Weather balloons are wasteful, and not very eco-friendly – they burst upon reaching high altitudes, then fall back to the earth as trash that rarely gets recovered. That’s why there’s now a reusable multicopter weather drone that can fly to the edge of the stratosphere.
I’m all for improving things but I have to imagine the trash generated by weather balloons is not a real concern in the face of where we stand right now as a species vis a vis climate change.
This reads like someone trying to sell me on drones
Exactly, plus we could almost certainly make a biodegradable balloon envelope if we really wanted to. The original airships used gas bags essentially made of sausage casing (it’s actually called goldbeater’s skin). If we can make lab grown meat we could probably produce lab grown intestinal membrane.
Fun fact, if the numbers given on wikipedia are to be believed, an average WW1 Zeppelin needed about 80,000 oxen worth of intestine. The USS Shenandoah would have used around 300,000 oxen worth and it got destroyed by some wind.
