Flying Cities - Are They Even Possible?

Are Flying And Floating Cities Possible? The Laputa flying cities of legend might be closer than you think! - Subscribe For More!
#engineering #futurology #cloudcity #flyingcity #floatingcity #megastructure

The year is 1962, America has just sent an astronaut to space and an engineer with the name Buckminster Fuller has just patented the Tensile-Integrity Structure. He looks to the empty blue sky, its fluffy white clouds and thinks "Its free real estate". What happened and are flying cities really possible? Let us find out.

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Whilst we have come a long way in aviation technology, with colossal aircraft taking to the skies like the A380, could we go even bigger and make a city take flight? Truth is, the technology is closer than you think.

Originally, flying cities had appeared in fiction such as the giants floating castle in jack and beanstalk, and Laputa in Gulliver's Travels. Humans have always been excited by the idea of leaving the ground forever, but back then the concept of heavier than air flight seemed impossible. Let alone suspending a whole city.

But then during the 1920s, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback speculated that one day we would actually have floating cities. He suggests that 10,000 years hence "the city the size of New York will float several miles above the surface of the earth, where the air is cleaner and purer and free from disease-carrying bacteria."

What was unique about his take was that instead of being powered by magic, the city would fly due to science. he proposed "four gigantic generators will shoot earthward electric rays which by reaction with the earth produce the force to keep the city aloft." This is beyond our current understanding of gravity, but the idea of approaching this with science was cutting edge.

Enter our good friend Buckminster Fuller with his game-changing Tensile-Integrity technology in 1960.

Let me explain real quick what this is. A Tensile-Integrity structure is a system of isolated components under compression are inside a network of continuous tension. In plain terms, think of triangular supports that split the load throughout the structure under tension, able to support incredibly high loads. In fact, they get stronger the bigger they get. A common form of tensile-integrity structure is a Geodesic dome.

With this technology in mind, the architects Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed the construction of a 1-mile-diameter (1.6 km) thermal airship, dubbed Cloud Nine, as the first floating city.

How would this work?

Imagine that this sphere or dome stretched over a city. Sure it would be massive and weight millions of pounds... but the air under the dome would, in fact, have more mass.

This air would slowly warm to the rays of the sun and begin to exert a force on the dome from underneath, much like how a hot air ballow works. The rise in temperature of even one degree, if spread over enough air mass would actually lift the dome itself and the city underneath aloft into the sky.

Fuller and Sadao envisioned that Cloud Nine would float freely in the Earth's atmosphere, giving residents and passengers a migratory lifestyle. They believed that it might be a partial solution to the depletion of non-renewable resources and stop the problems of overpopulation.

Why was it never built? There is still plenty of land on earth for rich people to escape to, and because the minimum size of a floating city needs to be so big it would be enormously expensive for little advantage. Plus lets not even get started on the rules and regulations of a flying city that travels over the world.

Whilst we may never see flying cities here on Earth, they are a great solution for planets like venus. The surface of our 2nd planet from the sun is inhospitable for humans, but the flying city model might work well up in its clouds. At 50km above the surface, the atmosphere will match the same pressure as earth and has the same temperature range of 0-50 degrees. We only need air to breathe like a scuba driver.

With a much larger amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, a city would be much more buoyant. It would require less sunlight to float even though the planet gets so much more. In fact, Venus offers one of the better candidates for an off-world colony rather than the moon or even mars!

Thanks for watching! Hit that subscribes button to see more weekly found and explained videos on this channel! And let me know down in the comments if you would live in a flying city!

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