Airships and a techno-steampunk enthusiast’s dream

I’ve never read a bad book or seen a bad movie that has airships of any kind. Balloons are somewhat of an exception to this, but if I never get the chance to ride in a zeppelin, a simple hot-air balloon will certainly suffice.

Off the top of my head, the stories I’ve encountered recently with airships are:

• Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series – just started reading this; it’s the direct inspiration for this post
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - a great movie. I highly recommend it.
• Airborn and Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel – one of my favorite children’s book authors. This series really doesn’t have an age limit, despite being considered a young-adult novel.
• Stardust - this one only sort of counts. It’s more in the fantasy genre than the rest of this list, and the airship in question is powered by lightning that can be bottled and sold. Stardust is only for the uninitiated airship enthusiast. (And, you know, anyone who thinks it’s a good movie. I thought it wasn’t bad. It imitated the Princess Bride with moderate success and didn’t get too cheesy.)

If you’re having a hard time understanding the awesomeness that is a floating ball of gas carrying passengers, watch Sky Captain. If that doesn’t do it, read either of those series. If you still need persuading, here’s a few reasons airships are the best currently as-yet-invented mode of transportation:

• Is not hovering essentially geosynchronous orbit? Airships provide geosynchronous orbit in your backyard… providing your backyard is large enough to support the immense volume of an airship. Sure, that’s nothing new, but you must admit, it does sound cool.
• Incredibly low fuel costs. Barring leaks and other issues that force you to blow up (not in the Hindenburg sense) your tank of lighter-than-air gas, I would estimate that airships have a small fraction of the transportation costs that your average liquid-employing ship. Bare in mind, that is an estimate. My purpose here is not to compare and contrast the various benefits of different traveling vessels but to merely generate airship fandom.
• How about luxury air cruises with much better views than the current brand of oversized ocean liners and no restriction to coastal ports?
• Or gigantic mobile homes? The current largest RVs are the size of a semi. With airships, the only limits are your wallet and the FAA.

The best (and hopefully eventual) effects of an airship excited populous are much more radical than one would imagine. First, let’s talk about property.

Currently, when someone buys a piece of land, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re buying the land. Your property is measured two-dimensionally even though what you actually own is 3-dimensional. There may be local laws on how high or deep you’re allowed to build, but it’s pretty much yours from the core to the upper atmosphere. I suppose neither of those extremes have been tested, but hopefully it won’t come to that before airships dominate the world.

The possibility of airships, or more generally anything that can hover without moving, means that property can be bought and sold in three dimensions. Instead of buying area, you buy volume. The concept of air rights is a relatively primitive example of what is to come.

Right now, all of humanity lives on a coast. Not a land-ocean coast, but a land-sky coast. We’ve begun to spread to the ocean, but there’s no talk of living in the sky (or, while we’re at it, underground). Not because it’s not feasible, but most likely because it’s unimaginable and not visibly necessary yet. But with the world’s population exploding, we need somewhere to branch out to. In my more optimistic fantasies, I envision a sky filled with a horizon-to-horizon grid of floating homes and businesses, complete with a steady bustle of traffic across footbridges and on mini commuter balloons.

The possibility for disaster in a society like that is, of course, much higher. Tragedies like a child falling off the edge would need to be accounted for, and the incredible safety required for a hovering city will no doubt put a temporary damper on humanity’s expansion into the sky. Hopefully the transition is smooth, and there isn’t another Hindenburg-esque incident that pauses airship development for another century.

Right now, the situation seems to be going well. Hybrid airships are such as the Aeroscraft (no, this is not an ad for Aeroscraft) are beginning to enter the minds of the general public as a workable alternative to airplanes, cars, boats, trains, and other forms of mass transportation. With enough development, there’s no reason airships shouldn’t be as common a sight in the sky as airplanes.