We need better propulsion methods than Helium...
...but we don't exactly have other lighter than air alternatives.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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What about a really big kite?
Well, there's hydrogen, but that has its own downsides. Like it's a bit explody, for example.
Not to mention that the flames while combusing are invisible by sight. It's also really difficult to keep contained and if it leaks it has ~11x the impact of CO2 per this article.
I used to like the idea of hydrogen as an energy medium but all of its attributes combined just make it really infeasible to use except for immediate applications.
While in the US our brilliant leader is trying to reopen old coal mines.
That being said, there are American companies that have been working on flying wind turbines for quite a while.
We have working models. The difference is the Chinese can say “make it happen”, and they do it. In the US they say, “Gimme lots of investment capital and how can I profit massively off of this?” so it goes nowhere quick.
Maybe we should call them “AI power dirigibles” and people will put some money into it.
ZepplAIns
Ugh. Well, Makani was the company I was thinking of. They started in 2006, Google bought them in 2013 and shut it down in 2020. Fucking Google...
tRump will shit himself (again) when he sees this!
Fly one over the White House, and another over Maralago.
Helium is a non-renewable substance which there is a global shortage of. I wonder how much it takes to lift that thing 😅
Not once we get fusion reactors up and running, then we’ll be drowning in that sweet sweet helium-4
Not once we get fusion reactors up and running
Yeah, about that…
Wouldn't hydrogen be better for lifting something like a wind turbine.
Yeah, that's what the folks who designed the Hindenburg thought as well.
For an autonomous platform with some sort of safety mechanisms for jettisoning the air bag if a catastrophic failure occurs, hydrogen does in fact sound like a way better and less scarce lifting gas.
Wasn't the way the Hindenburg burned due to both the Hidrogen AND the alumium oxide paint covering it?
Nah, it's perfect!
Not necessarily. It's not about the boom factor alone - hydrogen is a small atom, and so under pressure, most commonly used materials are permeable to it. It leaks through every material. It really takes something as solid as steel pipes for hydrogen atoms to not work their way through and escape. So while hydrogen would be cheaper to produce at scale, it's also constantly leaking out of any container.
For wind turbines, static electricity and storms would be huge risks as well, so the application of a floating wind turbine would not be ideal.
If you're producing electricity in it, you can always bring some water up and use some of that electricity to extract hydrogen from the water to make up for any leaks.
It really depends how bad the leaking is since that dictates how much weight of water is needed to be brought up and electricity must be used for hydrolysis.
Even with steel pipes you get problems with hydrogen embrittlement because hydrogen diffuses into the steel and can cause it to crack.
Helium does a pretty good job of that too.
Yes, but I think hydrogen likes to go bang 🧨💥
No worries, that only happens if there's a spark, like for instance some static electricity. Shouldn't be a problem here, surely this thing won't generate any of that.
Wouldn't this still need to be tethered to the ground? Would that likely have grounding cables?
That helps against sparks jumping between the balloon and the ground, but things could still get zappy between the individual components of the balloon.
"Skytanic" was a great episode of Archer. For anyone that hasn't seen it, the running gag is that Archer thinks the non-flammable helium is going to explode the blimp they're on leading to things like this slap
"M" as in "Mancy!"
"What part of this you're not getting?"
"All of it, obviously!"
Helium may not be renewable but we can manufacture it from things like boron
I need someone to explain the joke. Waiting 100,000 years for radioactive decay seems to be a bit boring as a punch line.
It’s not a joke if you hit boron with a neutron it releases the energy in the form of an alpha particle which is just a helium atom.
So take some boron-10 put it in a neutron flux and you get helium. This is being done in nearly every nuclear power plant in the world every second
It'll be really funny in 100 000 years.
I did not know that
People in the UK, mainly the coffin dodgers mind, bitch about how ugly wind turbines are they’d loose their shit about these. They seem to prefer the beautiful and discreet electricity pilots it seems.
Oh no, they don't like pylons either. They just want coal plants in poor people's gardens and subterranean power cabling.