I don’t want to live on this planet anymore
Fuck these land-dwellers. Fuck the idiots. “Planes are a thing of the past”. “A girl that builds an airplane, LOL”. You know what, fuck you all, motherfuckers. I can’t hear you over the sound of 45 kW of solar power and 180 kW of brushless engines. Wait, these little shits are silent. I can actually hear your whines. Fuck my life.
Yeah, no landing gears, I don’t plan on landing. There’s one person I care on this losers’ planet and she lives by the sea. Landing strips are for dodos.
I don’t go fast no, I will never go fast enough to get away from your ugly assface. I go up. My plane feeds from the sun and I feed from her plants. Got myself enough batteries to last through the night. Enough wing to rise over the storms. And enough e-books to not care for any company.
Tired of arguing it is impossible with idiots who ignore it was done decades ago. Apparently Helios and Solar Impulse are fake news. Get lost techbros who can’t NASA.
No, I don’t take passengers, you want to go up, you make your own. Get through your thick skull the equations of flight and power efficiency, and understand that for every percent gained anywhere, you can get half a percent more and a fistful of kilograms. You can choose to waste those on entitled meat or on chill non-judgemental plants. Guess which diet is better for physical and mental health.
No you can’t follow me, you can’t @ me, Saint Xyla grant me the strength to endure the bullshit noise that still goes through the radio.
Hmm, fun idea, but imagine if it became preferred lifestyle for 10 billion people, air-traffic control could be interesting… Solar Impulse got around the world, but it did land plenty of times. By the way to fly quietly and freely just try paragliding, with evening lift very peaceful.
Mostly to accommodate its human crew and because the point was to prove the possibility of zero-fuel consumption. Unmanned vehicles showed that 14 days without landing is doable and it was rightly dubbed “eternal plane”.
I had trouble generating the image, it kept wanting to give it the shape of an airliner, so I started from a paragliding shape. Most solar planes are designed as paragliders with light motors slapped on them.
She does not care about setting an example and to be fair she is going to remain a weirdo even to her generation. :-) But I do imagine that actually. This short story is just a way for me to flex my writing muscles that I haven’t used in a while. I want to tell the story of an attempted migration into the air, that relies on huge flying structure that are slow but demonstrate that once you have reached a certain degree of mastery in materials and energy storage, there is basically no limit to the size of your flying devices, as long as you are ready to give enough room for lift-generating surfaces.
It is so out of the real of what exists that making an AI generate an image of that will be hard.
This idea makes me think, that if those 10 billion were spread more evenly including deserts and wet-deserts (much of tropical ocean lacking nutrients), maybe there would be space, but then fundamentally the challenge is not flying machines but self-sufficient biospheres. If that size bubble really worked, same could float or crawl on the surface. Except that somebody controls the surface, however even your dream machine leaves a shadow there. But I’m sceptical about “claustrospheres” (did you read “This Other Eden”?).
Let’s be clear: I don’t think it makes sense to all go live in the air. I think that if it becomes possible some people will do it, but that will be as marginal as the people who chose to go live on a boat. That’s why my narrator does it out of misanthropy. I just want to use it as a way to break the solarpunk curse that seems to make us unable to imagine new things in a renewables future. There is more than just skyscrapers with plants and farms with solar panels.
And I feel there is something liberating in knowing that something is possible if you so desire it, even if you never do it.