Cloud Nine is the name
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster Fuller (; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing mo ...
gave to his proposed
airborne habitats created from giant
geodesic sphere
A geodesic polyhedron is a convex polyhedron made from triangles. They usually have icosahedral symmetry, such that they have 6 triangles at a vertex, except 12 vertices which have 5 triangles. They are the dual of corresponding Goldberg polyhed ...
s, which might be made to levitate by slightly heating the air inside above the ambient temperature.
Geodesic spheres (structures of triangular components arranged to make a sphere) become stronger as they become bigger, because of how they distribute stress over their surfaces. As a sphere gets bigger, the volume it encloses grows much faster than the mass of the enclosing structure itself. Fuller suggested that the mass of a mile-wide geodesic sphere would be negligible compared to the mass of the air trapped within it. He suggested that if the air inside such a sphere were heated even by one degree higher than the ambient temperature of its surroundings, the sphere could become airborne. He calculated that such a balloon could lift a considerable mass, and hence that 'mini-cities' or airborne towns of thousands of people could be built in this way.
A Cloud Nine could be tethered, or free-floating, or maneuverable so that it could migrate in response to climatic and environmental conditions, such as providing emergency shelters.
In fiction
"Maiden Flight"
postulates a post-nuclear apocalyptic world in which humanity has either retreated underground or taken to the skies in 'windriders', essentially large (approx. 1-mile diameter) tensegrity bubbles that employ a hot-air lift mechanism. These windriders may also qualify as
arcologies as they are, for all practical purposes, self-sustaining.
See also
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Arcology
Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology",. is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated and ecologically low-impact human habitats.
The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who be ...
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Colonization of Venus
The colonization of Venus has been a subject of many works of science fiction since before the dawn of spaceflight, and is still discussed from both a fictional and a scientific standpoint. However, with the discovery of Venus's extremely hostil ...
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Floating cities and islands in fiction
In speculative fiction, floating cities and islands are a common Trope (literature), trope, which range from cities and islands that float on water to ones that float in the atmosphere of a planet by purported scientific technologies or by magical ...
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Tensegrity
Tensegrity, tensional integrity or floating compression is a structural principle based on a system of isolated components under compression inside a network of continuous tension, and arranged in such a way that the compressed members (usua ...
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Aerospace architecture
Aerospace architecture is broadly defined to encompass architectural design of non-habitable and habitable structures and living and working environments in aerospace-related facilities, habitats, and vehicles. These environments include, but are n ...
References
{{Buckminster Fuller
Aerostats
Buckminster Fuller
House types
Fictional aircraft
ru:Фуллер, Ричард Бакминстер#Девятое небо