Pumping air into space, and lighter than air composite vacume spheres

[sparks]

    If you have a hot air balloon and charge it with warm air it will inflate and rise until the gas cools and the whole balloons structure becomes more dense then the surrounding fluid.  So an insulated balloon surface would have a longer ascent.  (I keep getting a picture of a styrofoam balloon)  Now the balloon is going to start going down.  Gravity will of course accelerate the descent.  Say the balloon is carrying permanent magnets on board and is descending through a series of coils.  I wonder if the energy gained from descent would be in excess of that needed to make the balloon bouyant.

[Cloxxki]

Aerogels (polymers with nano structure, consisting mostly of air) have been used in fabris already. I read that a lightweight snowboard jackets was marketed, but dismissed by athletes for being "too warm". Think of millions of still air pockets. Less air per pocket to move around and distribute heat, and millions of transfers needed to get to the other side.

I do believe firmly that insulation is the #1 way to reduce energy consumption on earth. Out houses in the winter now mostly heat up the outdoors (like carrying water to the sea), not the indoors. Good insulation and some living inhabitants with sufficient food to biochemically burn, will offer all the heating needed. In the end, all the house will be 37C/100F, just from the people in there. Any leakage of the house could be overcome by lighting a candle.

So, Sparks, the idea of a super-insulated your hot air balloon intrigues me. The low surface per volume of a sphere comes in handy in terms of insulation as well.
Even it would need to be heavier, it could be filled up with hotter air. If it flies up high enough, it will get a lot of extra sunlight. How hard, in 2010, should it be to make an air tight aerogel insulator that doubles as solar/heat collector? It might even send a laser down to receiving stations, to transmit heat gathered. This would be direct injection global warming, of course. More evil than any perceived CO2 effects currently utilized.

If good repeating lift could be generated, all that is needed is a long wire wrapped around a generator axle to make use of that.

All these effort looking up to the skies, though... If we just dig a hole vertically, we can lower a heat>electro converter, and just enjoy free energy from the earth. Modern houses here actually HAVE this today. No heating bills to speak of. Send cold water down, and it will come back warm. The technology consists of a deep hole, and a waterpipe going down and looping back up. Energy needed to pump water up is offered by just pooring some water in the other end.

I like the air as a personal and cargo transport medium. If the century old air ship were to be pimped some, with eather vacume or better insulated hot air designs, as well as solar collectors (relatively low but still huge surface aera and low friction from cigar-shape), we could be looking at long distance air ships rivalling highspeed trains, certainly for start-up costs, as well as for speed and ticket costs.

Smart design might also help to create vacume train tunnels. Air drag is the main enemy here (we have Maglev for propulsion and zero rolling friction). Vacume would also make it a 100% silent affair. New highspeed train projects get expensive because of noise violations. Deep tunnels, ugly sound screens... If a modular vacume tunnel with Maglev) could be attached onto an existing road road track foundation, with simple airtight train wagons, we'd be looking at mach 1 trains that make no sound, and take very little energy.
You can imagine what speeds can be attained when no friction bothers a typical train. Not wheels, bearings, or air. The initial accelleration, given the same weight and power, would be maintained continiously. 500kph in a matter of a matter of a minute or so. And once at desired speed, engines are turned off. Once near destination, KE is extracted by the engines, back into the batteries. All the energy required for an additional trip with be the difference between input (acceleration) and output (decelleration). So little, that in fact solar energy should be plenty to self-power the trains. Energy collected all through the day light, and used only to make up for losses during regeneration.
Vacume transport is like perfect insulation. A candle can comfortable heat a skyscraper, or a hand calculator's solor cell can power an entire train network. Just get rid of the losses. They are not so hard to figure out.
Energy losses make up for the lion share of our train/plane tickets. Not the drivers/pilot's salary. One ticket IS the price of the cabin crew's salary. The others go to fuel and profits, relatively speaking.

[onthecuttingedge2005]

Aerogels would be a prime candidate for making lighter than air vacuum spheres, the air volume pocket volume might even work better if the air was replaced by Helium Gas, Aerogels have a pretty good tensile strength to help the shell over come a decent vacuum Tor value.

The Vacuum sphere would act more like a lighter than air ballast.

and like was mentioned it might work effectively by making smaller already buoyant spheres and then use them as a filler structure and then simply remove any excess air in the filler area.

I really do like this subject because it relates to my exotic spacecraft interests which is a bit high, all though a flying saucer shape is a pretty inefficient shape for a space craft.

[Cloxxki]

Thanks @onthecuttingedge2005,
I unfortunately lack the education to be able to interpret aerogel spec sheets for tensile stength and such. I'm sure though, that I could find applications to a material with unique properties.

Spheres for space stations, perhaps even ships. But for penetrating and manouevring an atmosphere, saucer do seem like decent shuttles. The round shape sure helps to cuts corners, by not taking them at all. No front side to the craft to always have in the direction of travel.

Brain fart, work with me here. A bicycle wheel is kept from a collapsing rim, by having a centrally hub be radially connected with tensioned spokes. Let's 3D this. We start with an inner sphere, with spoke holes. The other end mounts to an other sphere. Tension is applied for strength of the other sphere. Weight kept under that of air, by removing air inside.
Are the spokes redundant, due to the perfectly even pressure that atmosphere puts on the sphere as inner supporting air pressure is taken out? I keep struggling with the huge task of a material and design that resists pressure like a pile of bricks under a car axle then the jack is needed for another wheel. It takes so much material to make the support. The same car, can be lifted off the ground completely, suspended from a wire weighting a few grams per meter.

Another idea.
The vacume might also be used to our advantage. As a force keeping components together, as they make up the multiple-wall outer structure of the  sphere. The vacume is not only pressure from the outside, it's also a design parameter adding to the structural integrity. "Somehow" being the essential addition to my idea. Im keep seeing vacume sub-spheres and tetrahedran structures, though.
Hey, if a shere can apparently be fragmented into 4-point 3D parts, then surely the sphere can added upon, like a shell, made up of the came strong components? A sphere can be build from 64 fractal. How large is the next step, and the next? The fractal bridging one sphere diameter to the next (say, from 1000 to 1050 size units) would form a perfect support design, the "double wall".

[sparks]

   The first diving bells were round for a reason as are storage tanks.  Your bike wheel has all the spokes because of gravity.  You never know which part of the wheel is going to get stressed.  Its like prestressed steel reinforced concrete.  The rebar is held under tension while the concrete cures.  This allows for the ability to cantilever huge masses of concrete that would crack if not for the prestressed rebar.  Another thought.  If you are inside a sphere and surrounded by mass on all sides which part of the sphere do you fall towards.  A shaft going through the center of the Earth.  You jump off into the shaft.  You will not fall out to the other side of the Earth.  You will get stuck in the middle and become weightless as you are drawn towards the center of mass which is now all around you.  Unfortunately the center of the Earth is probably liquid so you would be vaporized before you get more than 30 miles down the shaft.  Free energy galore down there.