this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
80 points (86.4% liked)
Technology
59627 readers
3175 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Idk, should they?
Betteridge’s Law says the answer to an article title with a question is always “no”.
I heard about this law several times, but I always forget whether it is 'yes' or 'no' 😂
Click the link and watch? It's very good. Looks like Veritasium spent a huge amount of time researching for this video and you're not just trusting his research - he interviews experts on historical (failed) air ships as well as modern engineers working on multi-billion dollar projects trying to fix the mistakes that were made in the past as well as discussing new problems that weren't encountered last time but would have if they hadn't given up almost immediately.
Still - it finishes on a positive note, those engineers do think the problems can be solved. We could have cheap cargo transport to anywhere in the world instead of exclusively to coastal cities with a sheltered bay and a harbour that takes hundreds of years to build. An air ship could deliver a shipping container, cheaply, to anywhere a helicopter can land. That's a problem worth trying to solve.
It will likely start with niche use cases, such as delivering massive wind turbine blades to the top of a mountain ridge... without having to first build a mountain road up to the construction site - and a road suitable for trucks that can carry an 800 foot long turbine blade:
Once air ships are solved for those use cases, it will inevitably be used for other things too.