By Kyle Hill . The craziest part of BioShock Infinite is n’t the estimation of compound a first - person shooter with ultranationalism , spiritual purity , and intense xenophobia . It ’s the idea of floating an entire metropolis .
Within the first twenty minutes of BioShock Infinite , you are introduced to Columbia , a city above the clouds , above the “ Sodom ” below . It ’s father , Father Comstock , sought refuge from the invading “ extraneous hoards , ” and he found the sky . Like BioShock Infinite ’s predecessor , the original BioShock , an entire metropolis is constructed in a nearly unthinkable environment with the help of delightfully steampunk 1912 technology .
In Columbia , apartment building , skyscrapers , bridges , boutique and boardwalk are all hovering above the Earth with the attention of rocket salad and Colonel Blimp . The game ’s float scene are gorgeous .
But I desire to hump if you could in reality float a city like that . allow ’s initiate with what it would take to drift one edifice and work from there , as any fittingly unbalanced applied scientist would .
If you take a detour from shoot and shocking your agency through this BioShock adventure , you ’ll notice that all the situation you see , everywhere you step , are held up by a compounding of devotee , arugula , and balloon . Let ’s begin with rockets .
The Saturn atomic number 23 rocket is one of thelargest roquette ever devise . At full burn , this demon can belch out enough fire and exhaust to produce1.7 million poundsof thrust . That ’s more than enough to help a shuttle scat the pull of Earth ’s gravity , but is it enough to harbor up a construction ?
It ’s knockout to find any real estimates of the weight of a metropolis , as you may conceive of , so let ’s take a large building to estimate the plausibility of repeal it . If a Saturn quintuplet projectile could hold it up , perhaps it ’s not so ridiculous to contain up a city with many of them . Take the Empire State building . Itweighsa stagger 330 million kilograms . With a bit of unit conversion , the math shows that we would need more than 420 Saturn vanadium rocket to raise it . And what a sight that would be . The suntan from the engines would perch up the sky , even at night . The shrieking of the fuel would surely cause a mass exodus of concerned homeowners from the public below .
ideate what we would demand to swim an entire city on rocket like this . We would have to lift museum and monument , not to mention roads and the concrete beneath them . Supplying that many rockets would require a fuel reservoir on a scale we have never even dream of . arugula are out of the doubtfulness .
But what about balloon ? They do n’t have the copious exhaust or noise or fuel requirement . Could He convey the heftiness of Columbia ?
Again we could expend the weightiness of the Empire State building to estimate some of the beginning considerations an incredulous technologist would have to weigh . He floats in air because it is less dense . ( We should employ helium instead of the lighter H , if we have learn anything from the Hindenburg disaster , especially with all the shooting going on . ) Let go of a party balloon and it pelt along up a gradient of low density into the sky . This density dispute produces lift . As an engineering rule of thumb , one three-dimensional metre of atomic number 2 can lift about one kilogram of mass . So how much atomic number 2 would it take to bring up New York ’s landmark ?
A lot . It turns out that there is n’t enough helium in the world to make Columbia fly . The math position it at around 330 million cubic metre of helium . In terms of loudness , that ’s around the same volume of oil transported in all the oil tankers worldwide each year . In terms of sausage , we would need 1650 Hindenburgs to keep the Empire State building aloft . And seeing that worldwide helium production is around30,000 metric ton per year(extracted from the undercoat and created by radioactive disintegration ) , the amount of helium to plagiarise just this solitary skyscraper would be more than twice the oecumenical annual product .
Now consider what using balloons would mean for a whole floating city . By mymath , there are 150 trillion cubic meter of helium in Earth ’s atmosphere . If Columbia weighs , in total , 10,000 times heavier than one skyscraper ( a very bourgeois estimate ) , then the amount of He needed to keep it in the air travel would be 2 % of all the helium on the planet . As atomic number 2 escapes from the city ’s balloons due to upkeep and failure ( and perhaps your own handiwork in the secret plan ) , it would need to be replaced delicately and right away . Before you know it , one city has completely drained the aura of one of the universe ’s most abundant elements .
And we have n’t even mentioned the stability of these social system , or just how disgorgement - cause it would be to subsist in a building that is invariably bobbing up and down among the clouds .
Though using a organisation of rockets or balloon to lift a whole metropolis is nigh impossible , there could be some workarounds . peradventure the brilliant head live the metropolis could formulate a cagey practical program ofquantum levitation . Operating within the biz ’s own canon , perhaps more supernatural elements are at work . Either way , for us still stuck living on the ground , it reckon like it will be a farsighted sentence before you may run out the window and have your head in the clouds .
Kyle Hill is a research young man with theJames Randi Educational Foundationand science author who add to Scientific American , Wired , Nature Education , and Popular Science . He writes daily at the Science - Based Lifeblog , and you could follow him on Twitter under@Sci_Phile .
ScienceVideogames
Daily Newsletter
Get the good tech , science , and culture word in your inbox day by day .
News from the future , deliver to your nowadays .
Please select your desired newssheet and state your electronic mail to upgrade your inbox .
You May Also Like
