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The Earth Sphere contains a communications center to help evolve the Earth's population into a global mind, a peaceful, sharing, free civilization with food and resources for all, sustained by natural energies. The design inspires and showcases this transformation. The sphere surface displays the earth's features as photographed from space. A sphere 80 feet in diameter represents the Earth at a scale of one foot equals 100 miles.
The sphere floats in a pool, tethered. This distributes its weight over its surface and isolates it from earthquake forces. A sphere has less than half the wind load as compared to a rectangular building. A normal geodesic sphere weighs 5% as much as a conventional building. This weight can be further trimmed to less than 1%, so it can float in the air. It can then travel anywhere on Earth and inhabit the sky and ocean.
Two transparent plastic membranes (Tedlar), spaced three feet apart, skin the sphere. Hydrogen fills the space between the membranes.. The two membrane skins are connected by membrane walls at the struts, creating separate triangular pillows to contain the hydrogen and lessen the danger of leakage. Hydrogen weighs 1/8 as much as air, creating buoyancy, with so little mass that it insulates like a vacuum bottle. The solar heated air in the sphere weighs less than the surrounding air and provides lift.
The sphere gains further strength and lightness by attaching cords to the nodes and extending them inward to suspend the floors. This very deep framework makes the whole surface act as a single structural entity. The floors consist of 4" Styrofoam panels. The foam is blown with hydrogen instead of conventional gas, and sealed against fire and leakage. Struts and cords beneath the floors brace the longer spans. Fire-retarded paraffin saturates the foam core.
NASA has made a new solar photo-voltaic panel on tedlar, a thin sheet of tough plastic fabric. Texas Instruments Corp. has developed a new solar photo-voltaic system which consists of tiny 1/16" spheres which can be applied to any surface. Since they are so small, they conduct electricity well even with much more impurities than conventional p-v material.. They can't break, so do not require a mounting panel and glass. This makes them very cheap and light. The "Asian continent" would be painted with these tiny spheres and face into the sun. The solar electricity breaks water into hydrogen, which stores in the membrane pillows. A fuel cell later converts the hydrogen back to water, creating electricity in the process. Roger Billings has built a fuel cell which weighs 4% as much as the fuel cell that NASA used on the Apollo flights.
Sunlight enters the sphere through the "oceans" to warm the interior. Heat stores in phase-change materials. For hot water, drip irrigation fogger nozzles spray a fine mist into a membrane space, where the sun vaporizes it. The vapor pressure transports the vapor through a tube to the hot water tank, where it condenses and releases its heat.
A propeller pulls air from in front of the balloon, then vents it through a shroud across the surface of the balloon. This high-speed air breaks the resistance of the wind in front of the balloon and also creates a suction at the surface of the balloon which pulls the balloon forward. This is the Bernoulli effect, which also gives lift to an airplane wing. The propellor/ blower could be mounted inside the balloon in the lower mechanical space, with air tubes to orifices at the quadrants of the surface of the balloon. Then the balloon could pull itself in any direction, including vertical. The orifices would be invisible.
When the sphere is tethered, like a kite, the propellers can convert the wind to electricity. The sphere shape sweeps the wind around to concentrate it through the propellers or orifices.
Wind resistance is negligible below 15 mph. An engineering-marketing analysis in The Future of the Airship found the optimum balance of travel speed to fuel economy for an airship (balloon) to be 250 mph. It uses 1/10 of the fuel as an airplane, carries much greater loads, and is much quieter, especially if powered by an electric motor. Airships can also be designed as giant wings to provide more lift at a smaller size.
Eric Raymond, the builder of the first solar-powered airplane to fly across the United States, is now building an airship powered by solar cells , hydrogen fuel cells, and a five h.p. electric motor. It will be 100 feet long, 18 feet in diameter, with a 16 foot propellor. It will carry two people at 60 mph during the day on solar power and 40 mph at night on stored hydrogen power.
This Earth sphere can inhabit the 99% of the Earth which is now totally unpopulated, the sky and oceans, as well as remote land areas. It can float above the clouds, collecting vast amounts of sun and wind energy and pure cloud water. The upper atmosphere receives ten times as much solar energy as the surface. A balloon forms a perfect spherical or parabolic reflector to concentrate the sun over 100 times. Hydroponic agriculture requires no soil and is nearly weightless. It yields three times more food per area than soil gardening . Balloons are very spacious. Large balloons would consist of clusters of smaller home-size balloons which could break off. If a small balloon lost its buoyancy, the other balloons in the cluster would sustain it. Balloons traveling with the wind feel no wind force. A balloonist caught in a hurricane reported that he could read a book without ruffling the pages. Then he snagged a tree. These balloons would generate a fresh supply of hydrogen from cloud water and sunlight, so they would have unlimited range.
A smaller 22 foot diameter sphere represents the Moon in scale with the Earth Sphere. This could carry one person, as a shuttle craft for the larger sphere. Moon spheres could be outposts set around the world. They could cluster around the Earth sphere. The Moon sphere would be a reasonable size for the first prototype.
Engineering costs would offset the material cost savings for the first sphere. After the prototype, engineering would be comparable to a standard structure, or possibly less, since the loads are so small in comparison to its strength. Its inspiring potential and visibility would attract investors.