Tell me exactly ONE (1) reason why this wouldn't work

Tell me exactly ONE (1) reason why this wouldn't work

Weight of the water on the seal is greater than the weight of water displaced by the air balls.

if it worked the free market would have done it already

So the balls wouldn't be able to penetrate the seal?

Fallacy.

Exactly. The water pressure on the seal will always be greater than the buoyant force of the balls. The seal can't open.

i've always wondered
helium balloons float because helium is less dense than air, yeah?
would a theoretical vacuum balloon be the most buoyant thing in existence?

helium balloons float because the balloon, when inflated, displaces a volume of air which weighs more than the balloon+the gas in the balloon

if you wanted to "fill" a balloon with vacuum the balloon would still need to be inflated to the point where it displaced more air than the weight of the balloon.

The reason a balloon inflates is because the pressure exerted on the interior of the balloon by the fluid that fills it is greater than the pressure exerted on the exterior of the balloon by the atmosphere. Vacuum does not exert pressure on the inside of the balloon. Therefore the balloon will not inflate.

If your balloon is not already buoyant in the atmosphere it won't be buoyant when you fill it with literal nothing.

>theoretical vacuum balloon

Okay, how about this variant instead.

You fill balloons with hydrogen at the bottom of a giant tower. As the hydrogen balloons rise, they lift lead weights to the top of the tower. When the weights reach the top of the tower, you deflate the balloons and pump the hydrogen into a fuel cell in order to generate electricity which is used to generate more hydrogen at the bottom of the tower for inflating more balloons.

The gravitational energy from the deflated balloons and the lead weights are harvested as they fall down the tower somehow.


Is this not simply free electricity? What's the catch?

You know what he meant -- something that weighs as much as a balloon but would hold the volume of an inflated balloon with vacuum inside.

Can't be done, very probably, certainly cannot be done with the tech we have now -- but IF it could, yeah, it would be more buoyant than a helium balloon of the same size, as it would mass less while displacing the same volume, and hence mass, of air.

The catch is that it will take more energy to run the system than it will produce.

If you use hydrogen to generate hydrogen, your generated hydrogen will be way way way less than your used hydrogen.

Thermodynamics

Okay, but couldn't the weights that are lifted by the balloon make up for the inherent losses in the hydrogen generation and harvest cycle, assuming you had magic material to make the tower ridiculously tall (like several miles or more)?

see

lmao nigga then how would you send the hydrogen down to the base of the tower?

>Hydrogen fuel cell that uses up hydrogen to make electricity that can be used to create hydrogen
Really? You're just burning through hydrogen to convert into energy. Nothing renewable or perpetual about it.

It just wouldn't work. You can make the tower as long as you want. You'll never be able to build a process were you'll be able to convert all that work energy into chemical energy. Or convert all of one type of energy into another type.

The process may run for a long time. But if you take the net energy of everything in your system (i.e. the energy you used to create it also), you'll never create a machine that will infinitely generate energy. If you ran the process infinitely slow, then maybe you could get close to producing enough energy to compensate for the energy you used to create the system.

Hence, if you had a larger system you may think it would work, but it wouldn't. All you would do is make it last longer before it dies.

like an infinitely esoteric battery?

I think he's saying the hydrogen would be burned and the electricity generated by the burning hydrogen would be used to turn water at the base of the tower into more hydrogen via electrolysis

Here's a lot of catches:
1. Whatever system you use to turn burning hydrogen into electricity is not 100% efficient
2. Electrolysis is not 100% efficient
3. The amount of lift a balloon exerts on the weight decreases as the balloon rises (because air is less dense as you increase altitude)
4. Whatever system you use to turn falling weights into energy is not 100% efficient

Precisely

hydrogen would be burned and the electricity generated by the burning hydrogen would be used to turn water at the base of the tower into more hydrogen via electrolysis

so basically plugging a power strip into itself and expecting infinite energy?

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