Stratos? Could it be done?

[sojourner]

^I think you over estimate the appeal here. This smacks of the same idea as floating cities on the sea or underwater cities. I don't see "millions of people on waiting lists for years". Maybe a couple hundred thousand.

 

[scotpens]

. . . I think the devil in the details is the construction materials. This cant really be done right now, as vacuum buoyancy for something like this would reguire far stronger, lightweight building materials than currently exist. In principle, they could be manufactured, but this would involve some advances in the nano-manufacture of incredibly strong materials. Its easy enough to make something that can maintain its shape with a vacuum internally, but it has to be able to light enough to float at the same time. And thats a lot more difficult.

One ancient proposal for a lighter-than-air flying machine was to evacuate the air from a number of hollow spheres made of thin copper and attach them to a carriage of some sort. Of course, it could never work because the outside atmospheric pressure would have crushed the thin sheet metal.

I suppose a cloud city could be kept aloft by, say, a few gazillion cubic feet of helium. But the necessary volume of lifting gas would be a hundred times the volume of the city itself.

As to the question, “Why build sky cities?” Same reason why dogs lick their balls.

 

[Tarek71]

^I think you over estimate the appeal here. This smacks of the same idea as floating cities on the sea or underwater cities. I don't see "millions of people on waiting lists for years". Maybe a couple hundred thousand.

Could be. Globally, though, it might be more like tens of millions. Although I think alot of people would like it more as a hotel, spa, resort getaway destination than for living. Only time, and supply and demand will tell.

 

[Tarek71]

One ancient proposal for a lighter-than-air flying machine was to evacuate the air from a number of hollow spheres made of thin copper and attach them to a carriage of some sort. Of course, it could never work because the outside atmospheric pressure would have crushed the thin sheet metal.

I suppose a cloud city be kept aloft by, say, a few gazillion cubic feet of helium. But the necessary volume of lifting gas would be a hundred times the volume of the city itself.

Thats where the real problem is. In principle, if you could nano-engineer and manufacture a light enough material thats also strong enough to hold its shape, you can do it. Thats the real challenge here.

As to the question, "Why build sky cities?" Same reason why dogs lick their balls.

Lol.

 

[Gary7]

Not unless some combination of a miracle powerful cheap energy source and anti-gravity technology are discovered... Otherwise, just doesn't make any sense. Sky cities in sci-fi never address the massive energy consumption by the city itself, plus all of it spent ferrying supplies to and from, including waste disposal. Just an inherently flawed idea, IMHO.

More than likely, in the future people will build cities in the oceans, powered via hydro-turbine generators turned by the underlying currents. They'll need the more steady temperatures offered by living in the ocean as opposed to the highly chaotic weather conditions experienced on land.

 

[sojourner]

^Garbage disposal on flying cities is easy, just push it over the side...

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

But why does it need to float just because the planet has low gravity? What about low gravity would make it better to have a floating city than just building one on the ground?

cause its space lol

 

[bryce]

Niel Stephenson used the idea of (nanotech-built) diamond-skinned vacuum airships in his novel "The Diamond Age"...

And I have read sci-fi stories before that talk about floating cities in the clouds of Venus (where the incredibly think atmosphere aids buoyancy) and in the clouds of gas giant planets (I remember a story about a floating terraforming platform/city floating in the clouds of Venus...and another about cities in the clouds of Saturn..)

Here's some recent articles about those concepts:

http://io9.com/5799182/cities-that-hover-in-the-clouds-of-gas-giants/gallery/1

http://www.space.com/5653-cloud-cities-venus.html

As for Earth...I don't know about whole cities - baring some major advancements in anti-gravity...or at least materials science...but I have seem the dirigibles in the articles you linked to before - and I have also seen proposals for floating hotels/apartment buildings for the uber-rich - the latter tethered above major cities. If those ever become a reality, could maybe see people linking the floating buildings together by bridges and causeways making a sort of floating city complex...