Up in the Air

In his book New York 2140, author Kim Stanley Robinson writes about “sky-living in sky villages,” with small, self-sustaining farming communities floating through the air attached to balloons. To Robinson, the upside of this arrangement is clear: “To be on a stable floating village platform at about 10,000 feet would be really a great view all the time,” he says.

The downside: increasingly powerful storms — which are expected due to climate-change impacts.

That’s why the best bet for sky-living might be a more itinerant existence. Like Rougerie’s SeaOrbiter, a drifting approach could be a way to deal with atmospheric changes and winds without expending energy to fight it. “It is not easy [for a balloon] to stay in one place,” says Lodovica Illari, a senior lecturer in meteorology at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “The atmosphere has very few stagnant points.” This is why most designs for airborne habitats involve balloons, which allow whatever’s attached to (or inside) them to go with the flow.

“With food and energy provided, [balloon-borne sky villages] would be a kind of wandering life with lots of possibilities for visiting places below; a kind of combination of travel and being at home in a small village.”

With a little help from an interface called the Float Predictor, designed by Illari and her colleagues, a balloon traveler can input where they want to go and the program will forecast which is the best day and time to catch the appropriate wind. In this way, it might be possible to slow-travel the planet, sailing along on the fingers of a jet stream.

Float Predictor was developed as part of the Aerocene project, with Argentinian artist/philosopher Tomás Saraceno. He wants to leave behind the violence of the Anthropocene — the geological era defined by human beings’ defilement of the planet — and usher in what he calls the “Aerocene…an era of ecological awareness, in which we learn to float together, live together in the air, and come to an ethical commitment with the atmosphere and the planet earth,” as Saraceno puts it in a TED Talk.

Whatever you think of Saraceno’s utopian vision, his thinking has some practical antecedents: When in residence with the French space agency CNES, he became acquainted with montgolfière infrarouge (MIR) technology: balloons powered by solar radiation from the sun and infrared radiation from the earth, which have been used since the 1970s by scientists taking air samples in the stratosphere. With no motors and no electronics needed to keep them operating, these simple balloons have proven longevity — one stayed aloft for 72 days. And they can scale, says Bill McKenna, a researcher at MIT’s EAPS who worked on the Aerocene project. The larger these balloons are, the more they can lift, and “with the technology that exists, they can lift quite a bit — as long as they stay clear of tall clouds below,” McKenna says.

Robinson suggests that solar energy, easily accessible in the sky, could provide such a floating village with plenty of power, enabling sky villagers to “do agriculture in some compact, intensive way,” he says. “With food and energy provided, it would be a kind of wandering life with lots of possibilities for visiting places below; a kind of combination of travel and being at home in a small village.”

Saraceno stresses that his ideas will inevitably run up against conventional notions of boundaries and borders, both horizontal and vertical. The troposphere (the atmospheric level we live in that’s below the stratosphere) is heavily regulated — both for strategic political and military reasons and the safety of plane passengers. However, McKenna says, the “stratosphere is more open to experimentation.”

Once you get into the stratosphere, of course, you’re above the clouds — and most weather. But then you’re too high for humans to live without being enclosed in a pressurized space. So the sweet spot for humans who might live in the skies would likely be heights of 7,000 to 10,000 feet, where most people are comfortable after some adjustment. There will still be weather to contend with, and McKenna points out that there are all types of no-fly areas out there. But perhaps, in time, navigating around or over them might be just another part of reexamining how we live.