Quick! To the Zeppelin!

we love. By the way, continue sending those in listeners. We love getting those. This one comes from Benjamin on Facebook and he says, I was wondering if there is a future of airships. I know there is active research into solar powered airships. Was the potential of taking old technology and bringing it back as new? Well, Benjamin, we're going to answer that question today and it turns out that it's not just potential, people are actively working on this.

What but to hold on a second, So you're not just talking about people going to steampunk conventions, no, which are awesome. Uh, You're not just talking about in fantasy worlds like BioShock, Infinite or like the Red Alert games no, which are awesome, although some you can argue do not feature the most awesome of acting. Oh no, oh, the Red Alert games certainly do have the most awesome of acting from Tim Curry and Udo Kier and a cast of wonderful actors. Full motion video games really did a

number on Human Curry. There's so many great ones, Okay, but they do seem to figure largely in our imagination. People love airships. They're they're great in this sort of retro tech world that people like to occupy in fantasy

and science fiction. And if you've ever seen I mean, we see blimps here in Atlanta occasionally when they're flying over the various like when they're flying over Turner Field, which I guess we won't be seeing in a couple more years, but at any rate, we see occasionally flying around near the near where our office is. And just seeing something that huge hanging in the air is kind

of phenomenal, right. I mean, it's it's something that you know, it's it's enormous, and it feels like it shouldn't be there. It's kind of it makes me think of, um, the Douglas Adams thing from Hitchecker's guys, the galaxy. It hung in the air the same way that bricks don't. That's a nice Yeah. So anyway, airships certainly do have a potential place in the future, and we wanted to talk all about what they are, their history, and what they

could be. Yeah, tell me about airships. So an airship is uh, usually if we're just if we're defining just a straight out airship the classic sense, it's a lighter than air aircraft. So you might say, how the heck do you build something that's lighter than air? Well, the components themselves are not lighter than air, like the like the the material that makes up the envelope that holds whatever is giving you buoyancy, that's gonna be heavier than air.

The container that's going to hold passengers or cargo, assuming there is one, that's going to be heavier than air. So what you need is something that is lighter than the surrounding air, so that the airship as a whole ends up being lighter than the air it displaces. Okay, in fact, it just dawned on me, now that we're talking about it, where the name airship must come from. It's like a ship in that it floats. It's fluid. It's in a fluid and it's maintaining its buoyancy by

I guess by having a larger surface area than its mass. Really, it's yeah, it really comes down to weight. I mean, it really comes down to weight. If you think of it as the weight of the overall aircraft is less than the air that it displaces, and it's going to have buoyancy, which means it's going to float on the

air around it. Uh. And then of course you know what, air gets thinner as you go further up, at least to a point, and then so you need to have be able to counteract that make it more buoyant if you want to fly at those altitudes. But the predecessors to the airships that we think of in the past, like the great Ones of the past, the precessors were hot air balloons, and there are a lot of different records of various people experimenting with hot air balloons in

the past. There's there was the brothers Montgolfier, who actually did so many early experiments and a lot of their work was so influential that Montgolfier till is still a term used to describe hot air balloons. Uh, they did their work back in seventeen eighty three. They demonstrated hot air balloons to French royals, who, if you know your history, three in a few years they had bigger things on their on their minds, but not for long because their

minds ended up being separated from the rest of their bodies. Um. But you know French Revolution, it was. It was a rough time for everybody. Okay, what they end up in their balloons? So they sent up well, first of all, their balloons were made out of taffada, but it was varnished with alum. And they launched a sheet a duct and I don't know what either of those things are. What tafada? An album? You don't know taffada? Okay, tafada. Look, you've lived in the South for how long and you've

never seen like a taffada dress my whole life. It's a fabric. And then album was what allowed it to remain gas tight, essentially hot air tight. That sounds like some British slang for aluminium. No, did you ever did you ever watching the Warner Brothers cartoons where they had the album and a character would end up and countering it and then their mouth would shrivel up into a teeny tiny spot like it was the sourst thing they had ever put in their mouths. Wow you have I've

got to educate you on cartoons, buddy. So anyway, it was essentially to treat the material so it would keep the hot air in. Okay, so they heat it up the air and the hot air balloon. That's what allowed it to have a buoyancy. And again the sheep, duck and rooster went on a little fun trip across the lake. As I recall from from reading, I wasn't there. I don't want to get that indication. Meanwhile, over in gay Paris, Jacques, Charles and and the brothers Robert demonstrated a balloon that

used hydrogen rather than hot air to achieve buoyancy. So hydrogen weighs less than than air. It's lighter than air, right, um, also helium same thing, so not not the helium and hydrogen or the same thing. They're not, but it's also lighter than air. There are some fundamental differences between helium and hydrogen that we'll talk about in this podcast, but at any rate, uh, that ended up being kind of the three main options for achieving buoyancy with a lighter

than air aircraft. Either you use hot air, or you use helium, or you use hydrogen two create that that bulliant nature that you need in order for you to fly now. Flying in those early days what pretty much meant outing that you didn't have a whole lot of control over where you went. In fact, there were some people in the early early days of hot air balloons who said steering was going to be impossible and only adult would pursue any attempt to steer. Could you just

flap your arms? I mean, well, no, that wouldn't really help you too much. But that was the thing was that there were there were cynics who said, there's no way that will ever discover any means that this is a curiosity at best, because there's no practical application. You will only go where the wind blows. You like if you want to mail something but you don't care who your mary exactly, you put it in the bottle and you throw it in the ocean. That kind of thing. Um, yeah,

it's there were people who said that. But then we got into some developments with actual airships beyond just the hot air balloon approach. Back in four, which was shortly after those hot air balloon demonstrations, you had Jean Baptiste mate Musner, who are muse, I should say, proposed a new shape for an aircraft with an oblong gas bag, which is that sort of cigar shape that we think

of as blimp, the blimp shape. He was the one who proposed that first, which would then be adopted by future builders, and that was the birth of the dirigible. So in eighteen fifty two, Henri Giffard builds an airship that uses a steam engine to drive a propeller for propulsion. So you've got the steam engine that's turning a propeller. All that sounds like you're kind of set. Well, here's

the thing. Steam engines pretty heavy, okay, so you needed to really counteract a lot of weight to get bulliant, and so those early early ones were not very good airships. They couldn't go very high. Also, there's always a danger with something like steam. You know, you gotta you gotta make a fire to generate the heat to create the steam,

right fire, and these aircraft are not always great. There's not good to necessarily have them together, especially if they have is to be made using hydrogen as its method of attaining bulliancy, because hydrogen in the right proportion mixed with oxygen, it's not just flammable, it's explosive. Right. And we'll talk a bit about the famous Hindenburg disaster because that's when everyone thinks about what these airships. We will get to that um at any rate, it was not.

It was the basic elements were there. Yes, the engine to provide propulsion, the method to get buoyancy, but it still hadn't been perfected to a point where it was practical. Uh. Then you had the area on airship of eighteen sixty, which was made up of three cylindrical gas bags that were tethered together, side by side, so instead of one

massive envelope, it had three of them. In Evo, a fellow by the name Paul Heinlein or hend Line flew ad dirigible powered by an internal combustion engine, also an issue the same as the steam engine. Very heavy, dangerous, but so it was not very effective, made it really hard to achieve buoyancy. Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs designed and built La France, which was an airship that used

electricity for propulsion. Now you're onto something, because you can make a much lighter propulsion system using an electrical motor than you could with a gasoline powered engine or steam engine. Jonathan, when did we get the famous, uh, the sort of name brand example of the dirigible, the Zeppelin. I thought it was the Ferdinand because it's named after Count Ferdinand

von Zeppelin, Right, this is like the Zeppelin? Is it sort of like the Xerox or the Google or the Frisbee of dirigibles sort of zeppelin or is it was a Zeppelin actually a specific type of dirigible. It's specific, but it also is because the design that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin came up with was so effective. Now now the earliest one, the l z one or elz Inns if you prefer um, not that effective. It had some problems.

It was four feet long, which is about hundred twenty eight It was thirty eight and a half feet in diameter, which is nearly twelve meters in diameter, and it used

hydrogen for bullyiancy. Uh. It required a little less than four hundred thousand cubic feet of hydrogen that's about eleven thousand, three hundred cubic meters, and that first flight wasn't until nineteen hundred he started designing it in he had built it by waited for nineteen hundred because you know, it kind of seemed like a significant sort of mark of the turn of the century, um, depending upon your view

of when the century turns and uh. And he used to get two gasoline engines to steer it actually had two different compartments on the base of it. So it's again this oblong shape, that cigard like shape, with two compartments on the underside, each of them with a gasolene

engine that would dry propellers. But some things that didn't have, which later models totally would have, included um stability fins, Like there were no fins or wings to provide any source stability, and so it wasn't an incredible success right out of the gate. One of the engines failed right away when they launched for the test flight, and without those fins for stability, it made it very difficult to maneuver this particular zeppelin. But what happened was Fernan did

what scientists do. You look at your experiment, you see where you failed, you go and you refine it, and then you try again. And so he did and he began to make Zeppelin's that were incredibly effective. And uh, and we still call them Zeppelin's, not not Ferdinand's. As I put in my note. Um, now, the most famous, I would argue would be the l Z one nine. That's the Hindenburgh. Now it was actually the the sort of the flagship of a class of Zeppelin's that all

were called hinden Burg class. I mean we forget that for a while. Zeppelin's were big. Yeah, I mean I'm not physically big, but like they were doing business and they were. They were how very wealthy people were able to get across massive distances in much less time than it would take if you were to say, take it a ship, right, you could get there faster. It's really expensive. Um. And they were also useful for things like surveillance, reconnaissance,

that kind of stuff. But um, the Hindenburg is famous for the disaster on May six seven, that's when the Hindenburg burst into flame. It was it was reaching the end of a transatlantic flight. So it was coming into New Jersey, wasn't it. Yeah, it was coming in and there was actually a ground crew active trying to bring

the the Zeppelin in. That's One of the things about these lighter than air aircraft is that in order for them to land, they usually need to have some sort of either docking station that they can latch onto or a ground crew that ends up grabbing tethers to help guide it into its final position. So you see those like people with the ropes and everything, And usually that also involves venting some hydrogen gas and replacing it with air,

which makes the zeppelin heavier. Uh. Your goal is to do that very gradually so that you can come in for a nice smooth landing. Obviously, if you did that too quickly, then you would plummet. So it's a very delicate procedure. Now, in this case, the Hindenburg caught fire. Like we said, hydrogen extremely flammable, as was potentially as was the covering. There's some disagreement about whether or not

the covering itself was what caused the real problem. Yeah, I think people don't really know for sure what caused the problem. Now there's there's there are debates. Uh. I tend to side more with the hydrogen hypothesis than the covering hypothesis, but but either could be correct and in any case, tragically thirty six people died in this disaster. One of them was a member the ground crew. The others were either passengers or crew members of the Hindenburg.

And not everyone died. There were survivors, So it wasn't it wasn't you know, it wasn't at all. Aboard died um. But at any rate, that definitely raised the concern about how hydrogen. This was not the first disaster, by the way, not even the first disaster with the Zeppelin UM. In fact, one of the early Zeppelin's crashed in Germany, and the response in Germany was that people contributed money so that a new, better one could be built. That was the

response to the disaster in Germany. But that was that was not the Hindenberg, it was an earlier one. In fact, there their stories, although it could be folklore that around the crash site Germans gathered and sang songs together, uh as sort of a kind of show of support for the endeavor because they believed so strongly in the Um the promise of the future that was the Zeppelin at the time. Anyway, Yeah, anyway, the it really kind of

drove home the dangers of hydrogen. Hendinburg disaster did, and of course it got live coverage, Yeah it was. It was filmed. The whole thing was filmed. And you have Herbert Morrison who did the commentary. That's where the oh humanity comes from. Uh, we're you know, the stress in his voice is clear. I mean it's it's not not in, not in any way and an emotionless kind of coverage. Um. And so that really kind of pushed back, uh, the

role of the Zeppelin in the world. I mean, that disaster was so well publicized that it really started to slow down. Plus you have the literal rise of the the airplane around the same time. I mean, you know, the the Brother's right had been working since since the early nineteen hundreds building the first airplanes and they were starting to come into prominence. The aircraft in general, we're starting to really rise in prominence, and the air ship began to kind of fade away. But now we are

hearing about them coming back. And of course, you know, some of them have been around, like blimps have been around for ages. We've seen them in things like at sporting events like Goodyear Blimp, the Big One. Blimps are they're a novelty. Yeah, they're they're meant mainly as either a way to uh to create like a tourism attraction, or it's an advertising thing, you know, or it's sometimes a means of getting some sort of unique angle on

a large event. But it tends to be for what you might think of as kind of entertainment or or commercial purposes in that sense, rather than a true way of moving around cargo or people. So we'll I have some questions then about why airships would really be coming back. I mean, now that we've sunk so much money and research and time into perfecting heavier than air aircraft like airplanes and helicopters, why why go back to airships? What

advantages do they provide? Well, a true airship, the biggest advantage is that it doesn't take a whole lot of energy to get them aloft, right, because they're using they're using they're using some sort of lighter than air gas already to get aloft. They don't have to use thrust. So an airplane in order to fly requires thrust, so they can generate lift, right, the wings get the lift and that's what counteracts the weight of the plane and

you can get up into the air. Yeah, there's a there's a reason, you have to get going really fast on the runway in order to take off in an airplane. You can't just kind of hop up. You've got to get that force going in the at the front of the plane to slam that air down below the wings and lift the aircraft up right. Yeah, you're beating the air into submission. Yeah, that's that's what helicopter pilots describe

flying a helicopter. That sounds accurate. So with a with a lighter than air aircraft, you don't need to do that. The energy you expend just to steer, to navigate, to propel yourself to wherever you're going, but you don't have to expend energy to stay in the air. Because of that, they are very energy efficient. They require far less energy.

And if you need to do something that requires you to be in the air for a long time, for example, to hover in a spot and to do something uh you know that's related to being in a specific geographic location, then lighter than air aircraft is the way to go. Because we've discussed this with flying drones. One of the problems with them is that they run off energy and

then you've got to recharge them. And if they run out of energy relatively quickly, like within the span of an of less than an hour, then their their usability is limited by that right. But an airship can remain there for as long as it needs to be there, depending upon whether it's manned or unmanned. Obviously, if it's a manned airship, then eventually you're going to have demands that are going to require it to land just for

the people aboard. But unmanned airships are also a possibility, and those could stay in a location for as long as their energy would allow them to maintain that position, keeping in mind that if they encounter truly severe weather then they need to clear out, because most of them are rated for pretty serious winds because they need to be. But even at that those serious winds, that's like an extreme case, and anything beyond that they are they would

be in serious jeopardy of damage. Would there be any advantage to using an airship in lieu of something like a weather balloon, Well, it depends on the the uh. First of all, yes, because you can steer it's that's a big one um. And also depend upon what the use is. So if you were using it to study weather, you could do that although weather balloons are pretty well, uh, pretty well suited for that kind of use. But if you want to do something like surveillance, whether that's uh,

you know, it doesn't have to be military surveillance. That's what everyone immediately goes to. You know, I think, oh, like military surveillance, that could be one use of it. But security surveillance. Let's say that you have an enormous event like the Olympics or the World Cup, and you want to have a overhead view of what's going on in order to provide better security. Then something that can hover without expending a lot of energy would be really useful.

So surveillance is a big one, whether again it's security or wartime or whatever. Environmental monitoring is another one. You would probably have an unmanned craft for this, although you could do a manned craft as well to uh in monitor any kind of region for any sort of environmental changes, to study uh subtle changes in in a climate, or just other types of environmental changes like like a fire,

that sort of stuff. Again, that hovering ability comes in really handy um and you can stay there for as long as you need it to stay. Or near space operations, so airships today can really high. You remember, you know Felix who jumped out of his his balloon to jump from space. Um, it's kind of the same sort of thing. You can get airships that can get too near space conditions, which means you can do research at that level or if there any other kind of operations you need to

do at that altitude. It's a good Um, it's a good choice because again, you don't have to expend that much energy to get them up there. The buoyancy does all the work, so you're not spinning tons of energy just to get to the right altitude. Uh. Also, you can use it to move cargo, and it's kind of crazy how much cargo you can move with the right

size of airship. Well, yeah, that especially seems like that be a big help because with an airship, the amount of fuel you're using, it seems like it wouldn't nearly have as much to do with the weight of the aircraft. Like when you're using heavier than air aircraft, you need more fuel if the aircraft is heavier, right, Yeah, because you have to provide even more thrust to overcome the weight of the of the combined of everything in the aircraft.

This is why if you fly commercially, occasionally you'll run into a situation where their problems because there's too much weight on the plane and they have to either you know, deny some people the ability to get on that plane or make other considerations. This actually does happen, so, I mean, it happens more frequently on smaller aircraft. Obviously the large aircraft tend to be pretty powerful, but uh, it is something that has to be taken into consideration. With an

airship that's lighter than air it's less of a problem. Again, as long as the capacity of the airship is great enough to overcome that weight, then you're good to go. So there are airships that, at least proposed airships that could carry as much as five metric tons of cargo. That's a lot of cargo. And think about it. You can go from the point of pick up to the point of delivery and not have to worry about geographical

features getting in the way. You go over them. So if there's a forest or an a lake, or an ocean or mountains, you go over all that or maybe a tun drap. I mean, it sounds like this would be very useful for delivering cargo to places that are otherwise hard to reach, remote locations, don't have good road access, stuff like that, and there's still a call for using it as a form of luxury transport. Yeah, I mean, well,

I'll think of it this way. You could take a Transatlantic cruise if you want it, and it's a an interesting experience. I have not personally gone on one, but my wife has. My wife went on a Transatlantic cruise and that's you know, it's that's definitely a luxury right. Um, it turned out to assume it turned out to be a rollicking good time because apparently it was a bit of a a weavy journey. But you could do something

similar in an airship. It would take less time. Top speed of airships that are being proposed today are in the hundreds of miles per hour. You know. I also recall Transatlantic cruises being set back by a disaster in the early That's a totally different podcast. So yes, that but that is also true. So it could very well still be something that is invested in for for luxury

air travel. So for people who want the experience of travel where they're they're going over great distances, but they want it to be this kind of luxury vacation experience. They're not so much concerned on getting from point A to point B as fast as possible. The journey itself is part of the vacation. Well, how fast can something like this go, Depending up on the one you're looking at, some of them can go around two undred miles per hour.

So yeah, because some of them, some of the airships that we're going to talk about right now, I guess it's a good time to to to segue into it are hybrids in the sense that they are not lighter than air aircraft. They're actually heavier than air aircraft. They're using some form of gas, like mostly helium these days, because again hydrogen is so volatile that no one really wants to work with it in huge volumes. But they're

using helium to offset some of the weight. Uh. In the case of the aeroscraft, it's about six percent of the aircraft's weight is offset by helium. There's another one called the dinal lifter, and that one I think is more like forty eight percent of the aircraft's weight is offset by helium. The rest of the weight has to be offset by something else or else. It's not gonna fly,

And in this case it's lift. It's the actual design of the airship itself, along with some some wings and fins that help provide lift, and it has to get up to a cruising speed so that the lift ends up counteracting the rest of the weight and then it can take off and it can fly. So in this case, these are airships that need to move in order for them to maintain flight. If they were to stop, they would start sinking because they're heavier than the air around them.

I'm just trying to think. It seems like there will be a trade off because if you're increasing some part of the airplane in order to make a pocket to hold lighter than air gas, aren't you increasing the surface area of the airplane cutting down on its aerodynamic capabilities. You can still make it aerodynamic in the in the right shapes, And so you can't really call these airplanes either. They're not. They don't look like they look more like

blimps than they look like airplanes. They really do look more like a dirigible or a zeppelin than an airplane, But they look like kind of a dirigible or zeppelin that has a funky shape to it and wings stubby stubby wings at that they don't look like airplane wings. But again it's one of those things where if they're moving at the right speed, they're generating enough lift to counteract that the rest of that weight. Um. And the neat thing about these is that they can come down,

uh without the use of a ground crew. And UH. For example, the aeroscraft, which is a proposed one, there's a prototype called the Pelican that's already been built. Uh. This this was a DARPA funded initial shotive initially, and it was originally under Project Walrus. Is the name of the project under DARPA, Project Walrus. Uh, the funding like a Walrus, yes, exactly. And the funding for Project Walrus ended in two but the funding for Aeroscraft has continued

in some form or another since then. And they developed the Pelican prototype vehicle which they hope to use as a guide for a fleet of aircraft, UM, something like twenty four aircraft that they kind of require three billion dollars in investment in order to build these things. But the largest, yeah, the largest one would be able to carry about two h fifty tons of cargo and passengers.

Now they use special helium tanks in their design, and those helium tanks can then release helium into the main compartment, which would allow it to have this uh, this boolliancy for to counteract the aircraft's wait when they're coming into land, they can pump helium from that main compartment back into the compressed tanks, and then they fill up that space with regular air, which is heavier, and that allows them

to land the aircraft more efficiently. This sounds kind of like the way a submarine would manage its buoyancy, right, very similar, having bladders that expand and contract, right, yeah, very simi interesting. And the dinal Lifter, which is another proposed aircraft that is um again kind of in the planning stages, very similar, uses helium to offset its weight in this case, and then uses those the sort of wings and fins to help provide lift through thrust. Uh.

It was tested in two thousand thirteen. It was built in Ohio, and it has an interesting an interesting feature, which is that it has detachable pods that can hold cargo. So you can attach the pods to the airship uh and then it flies off to its destination and then it can detach the pods quickly and then fly off again, meaning that you don't have to spend a lot of time loading and unloading the airship itself. You have to do loading and unloading of the detachable pods, but you

can do that in advance. And they said that the big advantage of that is, let's say that you have operations that you need to do in an area where perhaps a giant airship tethered to the ground would be a tempting target for some opposing force. UH. You don't really want that, right, You don't want an enormous target seeing there's something that's vulnerable, particularly if you're planning on either delivering or or taking UH supplies to an important

part of the world. So these detachable pods mean that you can very quickly load or unload the airship and then have the airship move on its way while you deal with the pods. So the airship could just keep on going and do very quick UH landings and takeoffs to make sure that stuff gets to where it needs to be without too much time being spent being vulnerable on the ground. And then you have the very a lift which was a that's that's the proposed designed out

of the United Kingdom. It's made of aluminium since it is the UK and UH. It has the top speed of three or fifty kilometers per which is about two seventeen miles pur It's pretty darn fast for an airship. Also uses helium to offset weight. Um. It can use variable buoyancy units to pump in enough helium to create lifts so it doesn't need thrust. It can do vertical takeoff and landing because you don't have to do any

sort of thrust to do take off. So the heaviest design that they have proposed would in theory be able to carry more than five metric tons of cargo. It's an incredible and if you look at a picture of the Very Lift airship, it's it's pretty funky looking. Um. You know, it's like an aluminum canister floating in the sky from the pictures I've seen. I have just had the most brilliant idea. What's that? Okay? We've talked about flying cars on this podcast before, Yes, and we're always

talking about man in an urban environment. How are we going to get the kind of vertical takeoff and landing we want airships? Personal airships, just a little airship, just a little One problem with a little one. Okay, how can you have a little airship. I mean, you're not gonna you have to have enough of whatever material you're using for bulliancy to be bulliant. That's that's actually quite

a bed it's done. So you can't have a little airship, even for one that's just going to lift you and maybe a briefcase alas, and not to mention, you also have to be counteract whatever propulsion system you have there. Yeah, okay, so maybe instead of a full body car, you'd just be kind of like a I don't know, a propeller and like a harness for your Torso now you're talking essentially about an analog jet pack. Like it's not even a jet pack, it's a propeller pack. The future is

steampunk jet packs. So you're saying. So what you're saying is you want you want an outboard boat motor attached to your back while a balloon gives you lift. That's what you want. I'm thinking about the future. I assume a top head and monocle are also standard issue, right, I don't say can't. Okay, that's fair. So anyway, some of the technologies will see developed about this. A lot

of its material science. Just coming up with new lighter materials like carbon fiber technology has been a big boon to this airship design because it means that you can create these rigid frames that are very lightly you know, they can be as strong as steel, or stronger than steel and lighter than steel. So that is one of the big bonuses that you know, it's one of those

developments that the airship industry can take advantage of. Yeah, not to mention just material science for things like the covering that's being used to to make sure that you have a nice strong seal on whatever gas you're using, most likely helium. Uh. Yeah, that brings me to helium. Now, helium is not exactly the most abundant and cheap resource on Earth. Yeah, that's a problem. We kind of need

helium for important stuff. Yes, yes, we need helium for many important things, from super cooling particle accelerators to children's balloons. I mean, are aren't there actually people who are mad? Yes, people are using helium for children's balloons. We don't have all that much access to it. It's not easy to get to know. No, helium is in fact one of those things that is very much a precious resource and uh,

and it is a problem. It's not easy to get at and we need it for lots of important things, including super cooling superconductors. I mean, liquid helium is incredibly cold, and that's what we use to lower the temperature of scientific equipment down to near absolute zero so that it can be a superconductor. Um and that's used for a lot of different things. And it's it's weird people don't usually think of helium as a finite resource like oil

or something. It kind of is, yeah, and it's and also it's just it's not easy to get so I mean, if we can ever figure out a way of getting all that helium three off the moon, then maybe maybe we'll be set. But um, yeah, right now, it's it's an issue. So there that isn't that is a problem. And also the technology that we see used in these these devices will largely depend upon what they're meant for.

Right A surveillance airship is gonna obviously have you know, sophisticated cameras and and other sensors on it, but one that's for environmental sensing is going to have different sensors on it. One that's meant for just transportation is not necessarily going to be as concerned with all those sensors.

Clearly there will be quite a few for safety and navigation purposes, but not the same sort of thing that you're gonna use if you're trying to keep an eye on, you know, the giant sporting event or a wildfire or something along those lines. So it'll really depend upon what the airship is meant for. That'll they'll determine what kind of technology is used on it. But another good question

is just why do we find these so fascinating. Part of it, I think is because it is this sort of retro throwback to what uh science fiction and fantasy authors, you know what, however you want, weird fiction authors whatever you want to call them, back in the day, the earliest in the genre, how they envisioned the future, and a lot of it involved things like zeppelins and dirigibles flowing around because at the time that was the cutting

edge technology. And so this this kind of vision, this sort of quaint retro uh sometimes super elaborate kind of view of what the world would look like, is something that appeals to us esthetically somehow. The vision of derigibles coming over the horizon towards your city is even more horrifying than a bunch of bomber planes. And I don't know why it shouldn't be. I mean, it should be easy to shoot down, right. It's the same reason, Joe,

why shambling zombies are scarier than running zombies. That is an excellent point, because even though it's slow, you know nothing is gonna stop it, and eventually it's gonna get you. It's not that it's the sudden attack. It's that you see it coming and you anticipated, and that makes it all the worse. That's why that's science to say. But no, it is interesting that we see this fascination with this

this type of aircraft. I mean the fact that steampunk has a place and that the dirigible very much occupies a spot of love in that world I played. I played a game at E three a couple of years ago. It was an early build of a game where you were part of a an airship crew and the wild Skies it might have been. I remember that it was very much like you were piloting an airship that was essentially like a pirate ship being carried by a blimp, and you did battle with other airships yeah, it might.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wild Skies was one of the games we talked about in our episode about uh three D gaming and virtual reality and full motion three D because it had been adapted to a sort of free play area where you could move your whole body and and sort of go between stations on the airship. Yeah, I think it had been. They had worked with the Oculus Rift folks to do a build

for it specifically, Yeah, that kind of thing. And you know, you couldn't help but feel excited playing a game like that. It just it was so evocative of certain I don't know, just just really just kind of tapped into the excitement center of my brain, saying, this is so cool. It's such a fantastical and yet ultimately believable kind of scenario in the sense that nothing in that, you know, violated

the laws of physics. Well, I mean, at some point, I'm sure you you reach a point where you can't keep scaling up sure the airship, And I don't know

what that point is. I don't know if you came across that in your research, but just like there's gotta be a limit right on where how you can contain he liam with the kinds of containing materials we have now, I mean, there would be a point where you hit hit the law of diminishing returns right where you're you're talking about a an airship so heavy that we there's no effective means of using enough helium to get enough left. I don't know what that limit is either, but I'm

sure that it does exist. One. I would imagine the larger the containers, you keep making it bigger and bigger. Just one simple thing about it is it's more likely to leak in more places. Yeah, and then you obviously have the problem of maintaining buoyancy and you won't stay in the air forever. Yeah. So anyway, this is a fun thing to talk about, Benjamin, thank you so much for the suggestion. Uh, there are lots of different plans

for airships for many different purposes. Whether they are going to be manned or unmanned or or you know, they're flexible and you can be either whether it's for surveillance, whether it's for transporting cargo or people. There are a lot of different plans and it'll be interesting to see.

I was actually I was actually really surprised at how many company these are proposing to do this, and I'm really curious to see which ones end up making good on that proposal, which ones are able to make that happen. A lot of it ends up coming down to whether or not they can get the funding that's necessary to actually build these things. Because the technology is there. I mean, the technology has been there. The basic technology has been

there since the late eighteenth century. So it's not that it's a technological barrier so much as it is a financial barrier. And to make sure that you can prove the practical applications are in fact useful enough to justify the expense. So assuming that that happens, we're gonna see airships in the air, you know, not not too long from now. There's some that should be launching literally by

two thousand sixteen. Whether or not that happens will all come down to whether or not people invest in it. Um is it a good investment? I don't know. I'm not an investor, so I can't I can't really answer that question. But uh, I like the idea of a future where you look up into the sky and every now and then you see an airship, you know, lumbering past. Although any any airship moving at Twitter, Miles pur you

can't really call lumbering. I think I mean just assuming there will be at least a few occasions where you need to get five metric tons of Vienna sausages to the South Pole, it makes sense. I know that there are plenty of people at the South Pole who would be pleased at such a delivery, and maybe if you would roll their eyes. But who knows. We we we

don't know. We're not at the South Pole. If you're at the South Pole or anywhere else for that matter, and you have a suggestion for a future episode, you've got an idea. You want us to talk about a particular type of technology, science, or just wondering what one aspect of the future is really going to be. Like, ask us, just like Benjamin did, send us a message either on Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus or handle at all three is f w thinking reach us there?

We will read your message. We will uh you know, if it's if it's something that really sparks our interest, we will tackle that head long, and we will do an interesting podcast about it, we promise. So let us know and we will talk to you again. Willison for more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot Com. H brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places