Some People Say the Next Countries will not be Built on Mars, but on Zeppelins
Airsteading is the idea of living on flying balloons, zeppelins or other aircraft in the sky. The political dynamics are similar to Seasteading — but the technical challenges and opportunities are unique.
Seasteaders want to conquer the high seas which is pretty much the only spot on planet Earth that is fairly easily habitable and not yet taken. Airsteaders instead believe that new advances in lighter-than-air technology could enable us to permanently live up in the air on zeppelins or balloons.
To me, there are two key reasons for this: the dynamic medium of air allows for totally different new possibilities in city design. And since the atmosphere is not as clearly belonging to individual countries, there is more room to create something new without being attacked right away.
This is usually the point, where people question the sanity of the idea. Living on lighter-than-air vehicles? Well, we should not forget, that there were airships 100 years ago that could carry 72 passengers plus crew around the globe while offering a spacious and luxurious travel experience that cannot be found in any first-class airplane today. The technology is so cool, the US Navy even had flying aircraft carriers.
I hope that one day, we will see nation-states built on connected balloons.
Now all of these pictures do not quite capture the size these zeppelins had back in the days. As a reminder: at a time, when we did not really have airplanes, there existed a form of travel that — in terms of luxury, space and experience, by far exceeds that of a private Boeing 747.
Obviously, Airsteading faces challenges of various kinds. Most of them are the more extreme version of the problems of Seasteading. The two major ones are:
1) technical/cost
I firmly believe that technical problems can be translated into money. But to get a rough estimate of the amounts needed it is helpful to have a look at the complexity of the technical problems. The biggest one is the fact that air is a very light medium and to achieve buoyancy without applying massive amounts of energy (e.g. Helicopters, airplanes) requires an even lighter medium to keep the Airstead afloat. Unfortunately, the lightest possible medium, a perfect vacuum, would only have a lifting force of 1.2kg per cubic meter. But creating a perfect vacuum is difficult and requires a lot of material (which makes the whole thing too heavy to take off, at least with current materials). So we have to look at gases that can counter the atmospheric pressure. The lightest not inflammable and somewhat affordable gas is helium. It weighs roughly 0.18kg per cubic meter, giving a lifting power of 1.02kg/m³ including the structure that contains the gas. Here we can already see that any structure that should float has to be huge to offer significant living space.
The airships of the early 20th century used hydrogen, which is half as light as helium. That means a zeppelin could carry twice as much weight if filled with hydrogen instead of helium. Hydrogen is also cheaper than helium. Unfortunately, it is also highly inflammable, which is a core reason for demise of the airship era.
Additional problems are winds, diffusion of the lifting gas through the walls of the structure, and increased problems with winds once several lifting vehicles stay together to form an Airstead. For long-term stays security and safety mechanisms will play a role as well (parachute systems maybe). At high altitudes, the low air pressure will require pressurized cabins. For longer-term stays the energy and in general the supply as well as boarding a flying aircraft will be a challenge (there have already been solutions though, including a mechanism to land airplanes on airships).
Despite all these challenges we need not forget that there were airships three times the length of an Airbus 380–800 around in the 1920s. They could carry more than 100 people at a top speed of 130km/h around the globe. If we take into account the advancements in materials and manufacturing technologies it is easy to come to the conclusion that airships and even Airsteads are a feasible idea today. (Even though now we would use the less efficient helium instead of the hydrogen of the 1920s). To visualize the advancements in aircraft technology we could take a look at the rapid improvements in other aircraft from the 1920s when planes could barely reach 200km/h to the Saturn V rocket in the 1960s which already flew at speeds of almost 10.000km/h.
Bringing down the costs
The solution to the costs (and technical issues) is private usage. Once there is a demand for a certain technology, the machinery of capitalism will bring down costs. Governments are good at discovering technologies. The first planes, rockets, computers, and also airships were heavily government-funded. But governments keep the use case focused on military or similar activity withholding the technology from the public and new, creative applications. Only once private companies start competing at making the cheapest and best product the price will fall and quality will rise. Batteries are the best example. They have been around for centuries, they only got cheaper and better once laptops and cell phones demanded them to be small, powerful, and cheap.
What does that mean for Airsteading? The current airship knowledge of mankind is rather low. To get us going, we need to find the use case that has the highest paying customers to start development. Then costs will fall and more and more use cases will turn out to be profitable. This, in turn, will make costs fall more and more rapidly until at some point big projects such as a new flying country can be built. Tesla has had a very interesting strategy where they saw the same principles at work for electric car technologies. Here are two first use cases:
- carrying heavy and large goods to remote places (like wind turbines)
- as an alternative to luxury yachts
2) legal
Just like ships, civil aircraft need to be registered in a currently existing nation. This poses some problems to possible Airsteaders in the sense of people who want to declare their independence while living on aircraft. An additional difficulty will be overflight rights. Airsteads will have the freedom to literally go wherever they want to go. Potentially they could just hang in on high altitude winds and travel the world without spending energy on it. But as soon as such an Airstead is leaving international waters or otherwise unclaimed land, it will have to get permission from the land-based country underneath.
There is basically a race between those who want independence on Mars, on the Sea and in the air, and whoever gets there first from a technical point, can deal with solving this challenge.
Conclusion
The legal problems will only get resolved when the first cases appear and laws are needed. So all the Airsteading community has to do is get going and agreements will be reached, or certain countries will be left out from the flight paths. Or Airsteads will stay above the ocean.
The bigger concern right now should be the costs, but I think the strategy for that is clear: bring down the price by having certain groups of people discover the enormous potential of the lighter-than-air technology.
Further readings
Care about Seasteading? Here are some good Wikipedia articles:
This is the Wikipedia article about the largest airship ever built.
This is the Wikipedia article about the only “flying aircraft carrier”. The US military airship USS Akron had four Sparrowhawk fighter planes aboard that could be dropped mid-flight. To land on the airship, they were equipped with a hook.
Here is an article about the now-defunct CargoLifter AG, one of the few undertakings to revive the airship industry in the past 30 years. Founded in 1996 they worked on a heavy lifting airship but until bankruptcy in 2002, they only developed a balloon that is able to lift 60 tons.
