Recently, a London design company produced a concept for a hotel which would hold 100 customers and float in the sky. This “airship”, as they termed it, would be filled with hydrogen–the same gas that was responsible for the Hindenburg fire, and many other airship accidents.
Remarkably, this concept was taken up by a division of the Korean giant Samsung, which asked the London company to further develop the concept as one of the “future concepts” so beloved by Japanese and Korean conglomerates, which they did, concentrating on the interior, rather than the fiddly little details, such as how to propel such an unaerodynamic object across the Atlantic in 37 hours (it’s “powered by large hydrogen fuel cells” – which do what? heat water and blow out steam jets? turn propellers? work an ion thruster drive?), and how to moor and embark and disembark the passengers (the only picture of this shows a demonstrably unsafe design which would almost certainly result in a fatal accident after about the third mooring). More pictures and details here and here. Note how most of the pictures are of Bryce-rendered landscapes with an added rendered object, or beautifully rendered interiors, showing kettles on ranges (in a hydrogen airship!?).
But wait, there’s more…
Incredibly, this nonsense got taken up by the mainstream media, for example, the Daily Telegraph, which shows the “docking concept”, and, possibly the worst offender of all, CNN, who report that although the design is a “concept” and only a “feasibility study”:
designers have developed a detailed and achievable technical plan for the craft that could allow it to be built in the future
The point is that there are no technical plans available in the release. Materials, propulsion, hard calculations (other than gross lifting force) are totally ignored. Moreover, the headline: “Could we soon be staying in floating hotels in the future?” completely ignores the weasel words buried in the rest of the article. Many journalists, myself included, are sometimes guilty of this to a degree, but this seems to be a particularly egregious example.
I try to keep off politics in this blog, but it is worth noting that CNN is often regarded as being trustworthy and unbiased. When faced with something like this, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that many half-truths and biased points of view on the political front have been packaged as “fact” by CNN and others. Readers of the blog are left to provide their own examples, but the implication is relatively obvious–read past the headline and look for the fnords.
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