The Airship Moment
We Might Be on the Verge of a Giant Airship Revolution, and Why That Matters
It's a good time to learn about airships and start paying attention to them. They're way more important than you think, even if only as a potentiality. But the thing about potentialities is that they can be realized.
Prove me wrong if you can. Seriously. I mean it. I want to convince you that it's your duty, if you have the right talents, either to embrace my vision and join the cause, or else do exert yourself to show compelling engineering and or economic reasons why my vision is mistaken. Why? Because there may be an opportunity here to do a vast amount of good.
And one company is spearheading it: LTA Research of California and Ohio. Here's what they've just built:
There are others in the running, too, who might be leading the pack in a few years, like HAV, Flying Whales, Aeros, and Atlant. But for now, LTA has the spotlight.
Why Airships Matter
So how much does this matter? Let's put it this way: I think airships are roughly as important as the internet. Or as unimportant as the internet would have been if no one had bothered to invent it. To be or not to be: that is the question. Suppose there were no internet, and you were an engineer who saw that the internet was possible. What duties might you have to make it happen? In the real world, the internet seems to have done a lot of good, so in the counterfactual world where it hasn't been invented, there's a utilitarian case for inventing it if you can, or trying to, even if the odds are low. Of course, people around you wouldn't understand that duty. That's what airships are like today.
Let's approach it another way. You know. ChatGPT, right? Do you know what “GPT” stands for? “General purpose technology.” That's an idea coined by some economists to study long run economic growth and development, to refer to those few technologies, like the steam engine and factory production and railroads and electrification and automobiles and computers, that have so many uses that they turn the whole economic history of the world in a new, faster growing direction. In calling it “ChatGPT,” the inventors are putting forward the bold claim that “artificial intelligence”/AI is a new “general purpose technology” that will change everything, like steam engines and telecommunications and electrification and cars, and will lastingly accelerate economic growth. Is it? I'm not convinced yet. But I think airships are a GPT in the waiting, a technology that will transform the world economy over a few decades, if only we get the revolution started by assembling a critical mass of brain power and money, and if (a big if) regulators don't block the way.
Let's approach it a third way. I've argued for a long time that airships have the potential to be a trillion dollar industry. By potential, what I mean here is that economic laws make it a kind of inevitability the airships will become a trillion dollar industry, if only the hurdle of invention, testing/implementation, and demonstration is surmounted. It's like how a dried-out forest full of dead wood has the potential to burn. A good forester may have a well-grounded rational confidence that the forest will burn if a spark is lit. There may be no spark, so there may be no forest fire, but that's the chief uncertainty. I'm claiming to be like that forester with respect to airships and the world economy. I can see that airships will be the next trillion dollar industry if brave investors, whether they're an army of middle-class crowdfunders or mighty kings of capitalism like Sergey Brin and Elon Musk, spend a paltry few billion dollars to light the spark. And what do I mean by a trillion dollar industry? Trillion dollar by what metric? Market capitalization? Revenue? Profit? Incremental economic activity? Yes, yes, maybe not, and yes… but also, who cares? The point is that airships promise to be a trillion dollar industry, give or take an order of magnitude, and that should make any enlightened lover of humanity on fire to make it happen. And I could run up the score by trumpeting obvious humanitarian benefits like disaster relief by airship, or by talking about reducing carbon emissions.
Now do you see what the stakes are? Do you see why I think you have a duty to join the cause or prove me wrong?
The (Maybe) Imminent Breakthrough
The odds of a thing happening can rise and fall invisibly. In the forest fire case, they rise a bit when there's a hot dry day, or lightning in the forecast, and fall a little if there's a drizzle for an hour. In recent years, the odds of the airship revolution taking off feel when Cargolifter failed, rise when HAV started flying the Airlander 10, and fell when it was destroyed by wind. Right now they're as high as they've ever been.
Specifically: Last fall, LTA Research and Technology got FAA certification to fly the Pathfinder 1, and they’ve recently begun test flights. Wow!
Why does that developing in particular matter so much?
Well, first of all, LTA is building big, rigid, lighter-than-air air airships– what I like to call “zeppelins.” “Zeppelin” is a little bit politically incorrect as a term for these machines, the because Zeppelin is a private company with a brand, still focused on airships, and still a critical player, but it hasn't built big, rigid, lighter-than-air airships for decades. To appropriate their company name for one type of machine is a bit like appropriating the word, “Kleenex” for any kind of folding, nose-blowing tissue. It's a bit unfair to a company to whom we airship aficionados should be grateful for keeping the technology alive all these decades. But the claims of natural language sometimes need to trump the rights of brand owners, and in my opinion, this is one of those cases. The word “zeppelin,” as a general term for a certain type of machine, is too helpful, too clarifying, to be forgone just to respect a good brand.
Zeppelins are one kind of airship. Other kinds include blimps and hybrids. Start by defining an airship as a machine that flies using aerostatic lift, that is, lift generated by a gas that is lighter than air (hydrogen or helium). Of any airship, you can ask:
Does it have a rigid frame?
Is it lighter than air?
If the answers to (1) and (2) are both yes, then it's a rigid, lighter-than-air airship, or what I'm calling a zeppelin. If the answer to (1) is no, then it's a “blimp.” If the answer to (2) is no, then it's a “hybrid” airship. Hybrid airships fly using both aerostatic and aerodynamic lift. Blimps, which comprise nearly all of the airships in the world today, with the partial exemption of Zeppelin NT, are comprised of flexible materials and maintain their shape by the pressure from the air inside.
Now, zeppelins have a big advantages and capabilities over the other variants of airship technology, a little like a car has big advantages over lawn tractors and ATVs. Blimps have less speed and scalability than zeppelins. Hybrid airships are less efficient and can't hover. So why would airship builders opt for non-rigid or hybrid designs, sacrificing some of airships’ most wonderful and useful functionalities and applications? I should say here that I'm not an engineer, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I think by far the biggest advantage is smallness, especially for blimps. All airships are huge, because it takes a whole lot of hydrogen or helium to displace enough air to generate significant lift. But there are differences between huge and really huge and largest-manmade-object-ever huge, and being merely huge makes the capex hurdle much more surmountable.
Blimps have some nifty applications, like advertising and surveillance and providing aerial footage at sports games, but they're not GPT material. They'll probably never be competitive in any transportation function. From the perspective of the aspirational giant airship industry of the future, blimps are just a stepping stone. Hybrid airships, being heavier than air, have some serious advantages in landing and ground handling and I have the impression– but I haven't looked into the matter closely and could definitely be wrong– the hybrid aerostatic/aerodynamic flying machines could be competitive in transportation functions and might have a durable niche in the future world economy.
But zeppelins are the crown. There's a monster capex hurdle to overcome, not just the build cost of the zeppelins themselves, which have to be very, very big for the lift to outpace the weight of the frame, gondola, fuel, engines and other equipment enough to make room for a payload. It's the testing. It's the disasters, because you probably won't get it right the first time. It's the trial-and-error crew training because no one has flown a giant zeppelin in decades. It's getting past the regulators, who have good reason to be skeptical. And it's the public opinion barrier because the sheer payoffs to hugeness in airship technology are just very, very counterintuitive. Everyone you will deal with, employees and investors and customers and regulators and so on, we'll have some natural incredulity and will engage in all kinds of inappropriate extrapolation from smaller aerostats. It's a hard road. But get past it, and zeppelins can do amazing things. They did amazing things, even in the 1920s and 1930s, offering fantastic experiences that no money could purchase today, and tons of complementary technologies, from communications to weather predictions to materials to fuel, have come along in the past century to make them work better and amplify what they have to offer.
And once that is proved, people will change their minds like an avalanche.
That's what's at stake in the upcoming test flights of LTA Pathfinder 1.
At a conference in Canada in October 2022, I introduced Alan Weston, the CEO and engineering mastermind of LTA Research, with the metaphor of a piñata. Did you ever go to a birthday party with a piñatawhen you were a kid? The piñata is a papier-mâché animal or something, suitably colorful festive and fun, which is filled with candy. The kids beat it with a stick until it breaks. But the hard part is that they have to do it blindfolded. And they have to take turns. One, two, three, four kids might vainly beat the air. Then someone gets a hit and– whack!-- maybe some candy pops out, or maybe not, but the first hit isn't usually decisive. But eventually someone bursts the piñata open all together and ALL the candy comes out and everyone scrambles to grab it. Maybe the kid who's blow burst the piñata open gets the most candy. Then again, maybe not. He loses a couple of seconds taking off his blindfold. Certainly, he doesn't get it all. There's lots for everyone.
Anyway, that's who Alan Weston is: the kid at the birthday party with the stick in his hand, whose turn it is the trying to bash the piñata of misguided, popular incredulity, and spill forth the candy of the future trillion-dollar zeppelin industry all over the place, for everyone's benefit.
Pathfinder 1, the world's largest aircraft, unveiled in November 2023 after years under construction, is just over 400 feet long, but that's only half the length of the Hindenburg.
It's the largest airship built since the 1930s, yet it must always be remembered that it's too small to fulfill the big dreams of the Airship Age. All the projections about the grand possibilities of giant airships depend on airships becoming even more giant than this, as giant as the Hindenburg or even bigger. Jove's Chariot, the machine hero of my realistic novel of the near future, is 1,200 feet long, which means it's not three but more like twenty times the size of Pathfinder 1, since you have to multiply all three of its dimensions.
My Airship Advocacy Adventures, and Jove's Chariot
Now, I've been pounding this message for years every chance I get, most notably at the ISO Polar All About Airships blog.
But there came a time when I felt like I was running into diminishing returns. There's only so much prose you can expect people to read extrapolating the structure of a possible future industry and the applications of an unimplemented technology. It's so hard to communicate the epistemic status of one's claims. If it's all just “speculative,” then what's the point? How do you get people to take the imaginative exploration of the space of technological possibilities as seriously as its massive importance to the human race warrants?
And so I tried something completely different. I put it all into a poem, called “Airship Manifesto.” :)
Then I tried something completely different again.
Jove’s Chariot: A Tale of Adventure from the Near Future Age of Giant Airships is a rather sensational novel, but it's also something very different. In software development, there's something called a “user story.” It’s a story about how someone might use an app or a piece of software, coined for the purpose of helping developers test it. Jove’s Chariot is an arsenal of user stories for 21st century zeppelins. To airship designers, it’s a way to put the question: “Could your airship do all this?” To investors, politicians, adjacent businesses, and prospective customers, the message is: “Yes, airships can do all this, or will be able to. Wow! Or at least, I think so. Don’t take my word for it, quite, but definitely don’t dismiss it, either. Get in touch with the creators. Spread the word. Make noise. Ask questions. Dream big dreams. Join the movement.”
Jove’s Chariot is not just another work of fiction. It’s a new genre. I’m playing by different rules. I have a different purpose. My contract with the reader is that this is a story about an airship that could really be built. At least, I think it could. If not, prove me wrong! Jove’s Chariot is definitely NOT fantasy. It’s not even science fiction insofar as science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy, pleasing the imagination by breaking out of the cage of the possible. The future world described by Jove’s Chariot is not only possible, it’s the “adjacent possible.” It wouldn’t require any big breakthroughs. It’s a doable, foreseeably doable, though it would take a multi-billion dollar investment journey and a lot of smart people and a few well-run companies and a lot of rigorous engineering and testing and whatnot to bring it about. The story is set within the expected lifetimes of most of its readers, and it describes a world that could be realized within their lifetimes.
Science fiction, of course, is a well-established genre, but I’m not aware of any science fiction writers who adopt this peculiar ethos of technological realism and invite readers to hold them accountable for it. Unfortunately! I mean, I don't have a principled objection to people immersing themselves imaginatively in worlds that feel futuristic and technological but are actually impossible. But I see it as a missed opportunity. We need progress. We need to explore and exploit the space of technological possibilities. We need to grow the economy so that we can provide food and shelter, clothe the naked and heal the sick, for the benefit of the human race. That takes a lot of imagination. So why not pour more of our imaginative energies into envisioning worlds that are actually possible, rather than worlds that are impossible?
I get impatient, for example, when novel like Airborn, by Kenneth Oppel, which in some ways provides accurate and instructive information about airship technology and advocates effectively for the airship cause, has its futuristic airships filled with “hydrium” gas, a lifting gas which is supposedly chemically inert like helium but lighter even than hydrogen. There is no such thing as hydrium. Never will be. Readers of Airborn have to suspend disbelief in the laws of physics!
Jove’s Chariot is not like that. The characters are fictional, but the laws of nature are real. I don’t take responsibility for the technological realism of every aspect of the book. The fusion power plant that figures prominently in the airship's first adventure, for example, is just a plot device, not a technoeconomic hypothesis. But about everything to do with airships, the novel is intended to be realistic, and test imaginatively what airships can do in the world economy and society of the near future.
I want there to be more novels in this genre, science fiction that is accountable for technological realism. For example, I’d be interested in realistic sci-fi novels about AI, or augmented reality. What would the world be like in 20 or 30 years if the dreams and visions of ChatGPT and OpenAI were realized? Use the story instinct to help us wrap our heads around it, please! If AI turns out to be the general purpose technology that its proponents claim, what will the future world economy be like when AI has swept through industry after industry? Could someone with expertise brainstorm all the use cases, and then pack all the technoeconomic forecasting into an engaging story that provides a tour of the future world that AI pioneers are working to bring about? Let’s see what this tech has to offer. That’s what I've tried to do for airship technology in Jove’s Chariot.
After so much talk, I owe you a plot summary. But skip ahead to END PLOT SUMMARY if this isn’t your thing.
BEGIN PLOT SUMMARY OF JOVE'S CHARIOT
The story starts in 2046, when the giant zeppelin industry, which will hopefully launch in the next few months with the first flights of LTA Pathfinder 1, is halfway to maturity, though still racked by financial bubbles, regulatory volatility, and public skepticism. At this point, a populist government in Zambia nationalizes a cutting-edge fusion power plant. The expropriated multinational corporation, before leaving, sabotages the plant, plunging the nation into a lethal blackout. Zambia's president, facing international opprobrium as a “revolutionary,” begs the world for help, and one company, a Taiwanese electrogeneration manufacturer, unveils a fully built replacement for the 80 ton “inner torus” that is needed to fully restore the plant’s operations. The problem is to get it there, with revolutionary Zambia sanctioned by most of its neighbors and the expropriated multinational pulling strings all over the world to tighten the lockdown. But an iconoclastic billionaire with a messiah complex, Elton Davies, comes to the rescue, volunteering the services of his new airship freight company, Heavenborne Logistics, to deliver the inner torus to Lusaka. Of course, only an airship could possibly deliver the massively bulky apparatus through Zambia’s one non-sanctioning neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Among the crewmen is one who will become world famous as Captain Jake Munro.
Jove’s Chariot, a 1,200 ft long hydrogen-filled zeppelin, is tasked with the famous mission. It sets out from Jamaica, where it was just renovated, rounds Cape Horn, hauls up the precious inner torus in Taiwan with huge wire ropes while airborne, crosses the Indian Ocean, rounds the Cape of Good Hope, and starts to head up the coast of southwestern Africa, on the last leg of its journey. Meanwhile, protesters around the world angrily chant against “nuclear proliferation” to “revolutionary Zambia,” while the expropriated multinational cynically pulls the strings of racist paranoia. Off the west coast of Africa, the crew gets the shocking news that 122 nations have signed a resolution ordering each of them, by name, to abandon the mission, on pain of being subject to arrest for nuclear proliferation. But Elton Davies isn't done. He gets the Zambian president, a master orator, to speak to the crew by satellite link, and he persuades them to carry on with the rescue of the beleagueredi nation. “Jove’s Chariot against the world!” they shout.
But as they enter African airspace, Elton Davies and his young nephew Scott, the somewhat underqualified captain, do something rash. The airship’s meteorologist says there’s too much thunderstorm risk to enter the DRC. And it’s a strong norm in the emerging industry that the meteorologist’s veto is sacred. But Elton Davies, who has a bad habit of thinking he’s smarter than the experts, the orders them to proceed anyway, and Scott enforces the order, after firing several “old hands,” the most experienced crewmen, for refusing to serve as his co-pilot. They’re still on board, however, though confined to their rooms. Jove’s Chariot is thrown high on updrafts until the lifting gas ballonets nearly explode, then plunged by rain and downdrafts until it nearly smashes into the jungle. Captain Scott loses his nerve then goes into shock. That’s the most dangerous moment, but the old hands seize control and rescue the airship.
Exiled and now mutinous, the crew meet on the deck of the crippled but still floating airship to decide what to do. They’re determined to complete the mission to Zambia, but determined not to obey Scott or Elton Davies, who recklessly risked their lives. The legal counsel, Pierre Lafitte, argues that they're entitled to seize the airship as a necessity for survival, and arranges a series of votes in which they establish rules and elect a captain, the 32-year-old Jake Munro, who also, somewhat accidentally, consecrates their altruistic mission by having them take an oath models on that of the Knights of the Round Table. The event is remembered afterwards as the founding of the “Flying Republic of Outlaws,” whose founders have taken the “King Arthur Oath” to serve others and abjure self-interest. On their behalf, the Captain Jake arranges to buy the airship from Elton Davies for $40 million, and they proceed to Zambia, where they get a hero’s welcome, and end the blackout.
So begin the 13-year adventures of Jove’s Chariot, Captain Jake, and the Flying Republic of Outlaws, during which they find a lot of ways to earn a living and live up to the lofty altruism of the King Arthur Oath. Still outlawed, they can’t go home, but they have a great time. It doesn’t take them long to make a fortune servicing remote mines, airship technology having opened up mineral development in the vast areas of Earth's surface that were too logistically inconvenient for mining before. They bring in miners and tools and machinery, and haul out product. They also stack manufactured housing units to make dormitories for the miners.
The solidarity of the crew is strong, yet vulnerable. In particular, there’s a long-running rivalry between Captain Jake, high-minded and stubborn with a kind of vocation to serve the poor and to treat everyone fairly, and the ship’s linguist, a brilliant rogue from a rich background nicknamed Face, who is handsome, charismatic and popular, highly intelligent, full of vague ambitions, and ruthlessly charming to women. He is a kind of continuing shadow candidate for captain, whom the crew expect would turn the airship’s adventures in the direction of money making and fun, instead of altruistic service. But Face is thwarted in part by the radical priest, Father Clancy, who joins the crew after decades of serving African orphans, and who is a potent ally of the agnostic Captain Jake, in the dedication of the ship’s efforts to helping the poor. At one point, the crew is torn apart by suspicion, in the course of an adventure in which they find $200 million of gold-veined rocks in a moribund airship access only mine that was orphaned by an airship accident years before, and, having no way to dispose of it, bury it in a wild hillside in the Sahel. But Father Clancy rescues them from demoralization by begging international charities until they give the crew fulfilling work.
Recalled to their altruistic mission, the knights of the Flying Republic turn over a new leaf by playing “airship cowboys,” delivering breeding steers from Argentina to the East African highlands, where they will enrich the stock of traditional herding tribes. Along the way, they answer an SOS and rescue some mariners from a sinking oil tanker, then stop by a cruise ship to drop off the rescued mariners, and dance the night away while parked above it. A one-night stand by Face creates an epidemic of envy, but it has a good effect in that the crew ultimately adopts and “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule that prevents gossip about caddish seductions, and gives the airship a wholesome and pious atmosphere, while still leaving room for lofty, chivalrous romances like that of Captain Jake with Anita, the niece of the Zambian president and a popular heroine in her native country, continually visiting and uplifting orphans and the poor. Face, not to be outdone, eventually gets his own lofty, famous romance, with the Portuguese actress Adelia Soares, and once Jake and Face fight a duel, with swords, over precedence of beauty.
Soon afterwards, Jake’s romance with Anita, which always consisted of a highly public and intense mutual admiration masking a diffident chastity, comes to both its apotheosis and its sad end when, after her uncle falls to a military coup and a firing squad, with the new regime closing in on her, Captain Jake arranges for Anita to be smuggled out of the country as a stowaway on Jove’s Chariot, in a crate full of copper products. But feeling that he can offer her nothing as a homeless outlaw, he hides his yearning to marry her under a mask of mere humble admiration, and lets her go into a life of exiled celebrity, where she eventually marries another.
After delivering the steers, more work starts to flow, and they enter the “Johnny Appleseed” years, where their regular work consists of delivering young fruiting trees from Latin America to orchard plantations in Africa, for organizations fighting world hunger. Airships are transforming the orcharding business by making it routine to ship mature, fruiting trees from dedicated capital-intensive, climatically ideal “tree maturation orchards” to “harvesting orchards” sites near cheap labor for harvesting and/or food demand. But this business is frequently interrupted by urgent disaster relief missions, in which Jove’s Chariot and its crew become expert, and famous.
When there is a flood anywhere in Africa, Jove’s Chariot arrives, hovers, drops ropes and platforms, and hauls up people and their goods, sometimes by the hundreds, and carries them to safety. Slum fires can be dealt with if the airship is close by. Jove’s Chariot hauls up hundreds of tons of water from a river, lake or reservoir, then hovers above the fire and makes it rain. Longer-lasting forest fires can be fought by the airship even if it has to travel a lot further. When Mount Nyiragongo erupts, devastating the region, Jove’s Chariot comes to help, and once lifts to safety 1,000 people stranded on an island amidst a lava river. When there is a famine in Malawi, Jove's Chariot joins the relief fleet and delivers hundreds of tons of food per day to the landlocked and infrastructure-poor country. Jove’s Chariot delivers two males of a critically endangered rhino species to where two females live, likely saving the species from extinction. All these good works help them live up to the King Arthur Oath, and build support back home for giving them an amnesty.
In 2051, they break away from the Malawi famine relief mission (which is frankly a little boring) to hunt down a Muslim pirate ship that is terrorizing the Indian Ocean. They find it, track it, and keep the US Navy informed of its position, even as it tries to sail to sovereign waters of certain Muslim countries disinclined to extradite pirates. When it takes refuge in anarchic Socotra, which might be a refuge, the crew of Jove’s Chariot torment the pirates by dropping things on them from above, exasperating them to the point where they decide to make a run for their homeland of Somalia. But someone on the crew makes the mistake of dropping pork, thereby insulting the Islamic faith. The pirate ship is captured by the US Navy on its way to Somalia, and the Jove’s Chariot outlaws briefly mingle with Navy sailors as friends. But some of the pirates jump overboard rather than be captured, and one of these makes it to shore alive, albeit with a hand bitten off by a shark along the way. He swears vengeance against the “godless” outlaws who polluted a holy pirate ship with abominable pork, and who becomes, for a few years, the archenemy of the Flying Republic, nicknamed The Shark, mobilizing teams of jihadist hijackers to avenge the sacrilege by stealing Jove’s Chariot and killing its infidel crew.
A kind of peak of prosperity for the Flying Republic comes in 2052. Rich, young, famous, popular, very busy and by and large good friends, they lead lives of beauty and heroism. They’re still outlaws, but their campaign for amnesty seems to be making progress in Congress, and few doubt that they'll be legal soon. They’ve developed a tradition of live music, and have “minstrel elections” every month. They have an onboard theater, the Midnight Follies, led by Face. They have a naturalist, Drew Keats, who regularly spots and rescues wounded wild animals that they pass as they fly, and keeps a kind of revolving managerie on board, while supplying zoos all over the United States. An art dealer, Miss Genevieve, has taken to traveling with them, buying local paintings in the remote places they go, eventually selling them internationally, and meanwhile keeping a kind of art gallery on board, while paying handsome rent. There is a constant traffic of priests and monks and nuns hitching a ride to remote missions and orphanages, courtesy of Father Clancy, whose revolutionary brand of Christianity has made him an international celebrity in his own right. Though busy, they picked up a habit back in 2048 of seeming to be on permanent vacation, symbolized by their trademark stunt of bungee jumping into Victoria Falls. There are online Jove’s Chariot trackers, and increasingly, crowds gathered to cheer for them whenever they pass over a city. And they broadcast from the deck 24/7, and hundreds of thousands are viewing the feed at any given time. A top engineer joins the crew and makes a business selling flight data, strategically competing with a cartel of big flight data owners, and sometimes influencing the missions in the interests of aeronautical experimentation. And one crewman, the moody mathematician Vinod D’Souza, with help from Face, spins off a ground operation and raises money in Dubai to develop a huge supermast in Comoros that promises to be the logistics hub of the southern Indian Ocean. In the West, which is losing a battle of nuclear brinksmanship against the Taliban jihadist empire centered in Mecca, the carefree, faraway life of the Jove’s Chariot outlaws seems to haunt every imagination as a dream of blissful escape.
Part of the weird glamor of the Flying Republic comes from the crew's growing mastery of swordplay. It seems to have grown out of Face’s theater hobby, but then turned into an idiosyncratic security solution, at a time when the rapid increase of people with airship experience heightens the threat of hijacking, and especially after the sinister vendetta of The Shark against Jove's Chariot becomes known. It won't do to shoot guns on a hydrogen-filled airship. Bullets puncture gas bags. But the outlaws are afraid that the CIA, which they're pretty sure won't blow them up because the Americans, unlike The Shark, don't think they deserve that, would just love to hack a security system to lock them out of their own cockpit, leaving the outlaws to float helplessly until a US government airship comes to tow them into custody. Also, the outlaws like to be friendly and hospitable and mingle with the tens or hundreds of people, many of them strangers, who are usually on board hitching a ride somewhere. And so they take to wearing body armor under their billowy shirts, and sword belts at their sides, and recruit a swordmaster, Luca Spagnoli, to train them. They hone their skills in spectacular onboard tournaments.
But the moment of prosperity doesn’t last, and 2053 is full of disappointments.
First, a certain crisis of ethnic cleansing breaks out, and they go there, hoping to help somehow. They have food and tents and medical supplies, as for a flood relief mission, but instead, they watch helplessly in a solitary place as a band of genocidal fanatics with Jeeps and machine guns overtakes a thousand refugees, unarmed families with children on foot, and slaughters them all. They have no force. Father Clancy has to be tied up to stop him from dropping down in a parachute for a futile martyrdom preaching the peace of Christ to raging murderers in a language they don’t understand. Face alone possibly does some good by telling lies over the ship’s loudspeakers about 10,000 US peacekeepers who are marching just up the road, and 1,000 US Marines who might arrive first and are less scrupulous. It gives some of them pause, but the killing frenzy has its way, and when some crewmen start dropping things on the killers, drawing the gaze and their guns skyward, Captain Jake orders a retreat rather than let the airship be shot out of the sky for no purpose. Morale is devastated.
Second, partly from a kind of remorse at their failure to stop that killing, Captain Jake finally accepts a mission that was long asked of him, to deliver arms to freedom fighters in Ethiopia against a Taliban-backed regime that has taken over the country and is crushing resistance. On a cloudy night, they fly from Kenya with a huge shipment of weaponry donated secretly by Islamophobic Texas billionaires. Yet when they reach the supposed freedom fighter camp, standing in a circle of weaponless men, and a few loose-looking women, eyeing the loot greedily, Jake intuits that they’re frauds, and orders the arms to be hauled back up. The mission was pointless, its backers are furious, and morale takes another blow.
Third, the case of Jove’s Chariot finally comes up for consideration in Congress, and at first, it looks like an easy win. Father Clancy, never outlawed, goes to Washington and addresses Congress with terrible eloquence that leaves the crew dazzled and certain of success. All but Face. He says with confidence that Father Clancy's revolutionary rhetoric has doomed them. But the others think he's a fool. The favorable testimony continues: rescuees, philanthropies who vouch for their work, children from towns who love the zoo animals Jove's Chariot gave them, lots of irrelevant organizations that are just engaged in virtue signaling by jumping on the popular amnesty bandwagon, US Navy officers grateful for the airships’ help in anti-piracy work, as well as the penitent multinational that first agitated to make them outlaws and now wants to improve its image. Against all this, the government of India, an increasingly indispensable US ally, weighs in strongly against amnesty, on the grounds that the Jove's Chariot outlaws are violators of biotech IP, for they claim, although it's disputed, that many of the livestock and fruit trees that the outlaws delivered to Africa embodied patents owned by Indian companies, and were forbidden to be shipped into countries without proper systems for collecting and remitting the required royalties. And then Congress, opinions being divided, moves on to other business, and the seven-year campaign for amnesty ends in failure. On the Jove's Chariot outlaws, watching the proceedings by satellite link while hovering off of McDonald Island in the southern Indian Ocean, a terrible gloom descends.
At about that time, a whistleblower reveals many of the secrets of The Shark’s international network of jihadist hijackers, and before he is murdered in his room the following day, enough of his story gets out that the outlaws suddenly discover how many lucky escapes saved them from becoming their archenemy’s prey over the previous few months. They cannot return to Africa. It's time to flee to the ends of the Earth, to Antarctica, where gigantic boom of mineral exploration, called the Gold Rush, is getting underway. Some of the crew start to drift away, and Face runs off to stay with his mistress Adelia Soares while she makes a movie in Cabo Verde, taking advantage of the general hospitality of island jurisdictions to airshipmen without much scrutiny of legal status, on “any port in a storm” principles expansively interpreted.
By 2054, it has been foreseen for 20 years that airships will make possible the mineral exploration and exploitation of Antarctica, but activity was held back by international treaties. Mineral exploration occurred, but either clandestiny or on some scientific pretext, such as paleontology or climate research. But the treaties are due to lapse in 2054, and all of Antarctica will be governed only by a loose gentleman's agreement among the great powers around the principle of private enterprise and first come, first served. Make a mine, you own it. Into this newly Wild West at the bottom of the world there will surge a fleet of hundreds of airships, some of them new and cutting edge and professionally staffed, more of them secondhand, clumsily retrofitted for cold weather, and manned by rascals and desperados, the offscouring of the human race, seeking do-or-die fortunes. Into this maelstrom of lawless speculation and adventure flies Jove’s Chariot, the most famous airship in the world, and finds a continent like a hall of mirrors, full of young men from nowhere wanting to imitate their own adventures. In a continent of men without pasts, fame confers a kind of power: the outlaws of the Flying Republic are trusted because they are known. A recommendation from Captain Jake can make a man’s name and hand him a wealth of opportunities overnight, and soon, without really even trying, the famous outlaw airshipman has filled with the frozen continent with men beholden to him who are making their fortunes. “King of Antarctica,” some start to call him, and a grand destiny is calling, but it’s not the destiny Jake wants. And the crew, after so many years of adventure, seems to want to settle down. And so when the austral summer of 2055-2056 comes, when it’s time for more Antarctic adventures, they stay in Argentina, doing the simple, safe, humble work of resupplying fishing boats in the polar seas and bringing the catch home. But Jake still remembers the King Arthur Oath and their duty to serve the poor of the earth.
Face, too, has found a rendezvous with destiny. After a few months in Cabo Verde together, his actress took fright at her growing attachment to a man living as an idle gigolo. She lost her temper and said she couldn't respect him. To redeem himself, while keeping her in his orbit, he challenges her to follow him to Comoros, where, he says, his friend Vinod desperately needs him. In Comoros, the dazzling commercial success of Vinod’s airship supermast, which already voluntarily submitted to a partial nationalization on the advice of Captain Jake, has political feet of clay. It has had to take over government agencies and generally run things to prevent anarchy after a lost war and a failed coup. Face, leveraging his linguistic genius, manages to defray seething populist resentment at the newfangled foreign technocracy by founding an entrepreneurial ministry of culture that funds a flowering of the arts in traditional languages, appeasing unease at all the change by satirizing the new order, without spilling over into revolutionary ferment, and above all, competing for hearts and minds with the rising Islamist alternative. His actress mistress is suitably dazzled by his versatility and effectiveness, and he puts her movie star prestige to good use in popularizing the rule of the Jove’s Chariot Company of Comoros. But he won’t marry her, pretending almost never to have heard of the institution, in his usual way– and who would marry them anyway, when he’s a man with no country and no religion?-- and she begins to feel lost and bored. So Face makes his way to Dubai, where his movie star mistress might feel more at home, and finds money for a new venture from investors who are eating out of his hand after his success in Comoros. This time, he’s heard a rumor, through strange backdoor connections in mineral exploration and espionage, of the biggest score of all down in Antarctica, and he gets himself an airship, calls it the Stardust, and invites Adelia to join him again as he captains his way to fortune by striking the neodymium motherlode… But this time, it’s too much. She leaves him. Face is proved right again, stakes his claim, strikes pay dirt, and soon finds himself at the head of a mine that is pouring forth stuff industry is hungry for. He’s on track to make billions. But ennui catches up with him, as usual. He misses his old friends.
During the filming in Cabo Verde, Face met a girl backstage, Alyssa D’Angelo, and casually captivated her, as was his wont. She was another actress, in a very minor role, type cast as eye candy but with lofty artistic ambitions, frustrated with the shallowness and greed of Hollywood. Face listens with wise sympathy, till he becomes her confidant, then little by little lets all his tales of adventure on Jove’s Chariot come out, until she’s fascinated. But he's involved with Adelia, and cannot reap her love for himself. And so, oddly enough, he recommends her to his archrival, Captain Jake, sensing that he alone could understand, sympathize with her aspirations, and share her love of virtue. She hesitates to approach the famous captain. But when a “surfer girl” video clip of her in the Cabo Verde movie goes viral, she publicly turns to him for advice. An intense public correspondence begins, on Twitter, in the eyes of Jake’s myriad fans, and she seeks his help on how to manage her entry into fame. The publicity helps are getting Maid Marian role in a Robin Hood movie, which should be just what she's dreamed of, an inspirational character representing virtue. But she's a perfectionist, takes to the internet and savages her own performance. Jake defends her against herself, and their public debate about the film evolves into a job description for Alyssa’s own future. She will be Maid Marian to Jake’s Robin Hood, the flame of his heart and his friend in high places, at home in both worlds, the “Nottingham” of Hollywood and Washington, and the “Sherwood Forest” of Africa and the southern oceans.
For Jake has his own reasons to cultivate her. Still the most famous airshipmen in the world, the Jove's Chariot crew, weary at heart after their long adventures, their many disappointments, and the horrors they've seen, wants to settle into semi-retirement. The Shark has been captured and executed, and sky piracy largely crushed throughout Africa. So there seems to be nothing stopping the crew from returning to flood relief missions and all the rest of the altruistic work they used to do. But they like the peaceful life now. Tourists come from all over the world to see them. They've become like a living epilogue of themselves. And Jake thinks it’s wrong, but how can he inspire them to heroism again?
And so, alongside his public correspondence, he privately beseeches Alyssa to come inspire his men. At last, on Christmas Day of 2055, she arranges to have herself delivered to the decks of Jove’s Chariot as a Christmas present for the captain, answering the call. And almost at once, crew begins to feel ashamed at what they’ve come to, and little worthy of the presence, among them of the beautiful, famous, high-minded movie star. Should she have to keep company with men whose trade is nothing but hauling fish? And yet, at first, Jake and Alyssa almost forget their plan to try to turn the minds of the crew back to rescue work and heroism, because they're so much in love, so busy with their romantic raptures that the future in the past are forgotten. Still, when the call comes, they’re ready.
A few weeks after Christmas 2055, a terrible storm floods the Nigerian capital of Lagos, leaving millions desperate, short of food and clothes and tents and stranded on rooftops and so on, Jake asks the crew to go help, and in the presence of the holy Father Clancy and the beautiful Alyssa D’Angelo, they cannot say no. On the way to Lagos, they get overtaken by an airship that they recognize as the Stardust, Face’s airship. When the Stardust overtakes Jove’s Chariot and flies directly above it, and then a man drops out of it onto Jove’s Chariot’s roof and seems set to break in through the manholes on top, the crew fear they're dealing with a hijacker or a bomber. But then they recognize Face, and everyone but Jake cheers with joy. He asks to be restored to the crew, and the crew accepts him back with only one dissenting vote: Captain Jake’s. And he turns his gaze on Alyssa, and she weakens immediately, her heart torn in two. She had always dreamed of being faithful to one man, but suddenly she feels all the old fascination with the handsomest man she has ever known, who comforted her lonely spirit, really listened to her, and understood all her artistic yearnings in a way that no one else in her life could ever do, certainly not Captain Jake. Alyssa’s life mission had always been to use art to inspire virtue. Now Jake represents virtue, but Face represents art, and Alyssa’s heart can’t settle on one or the other.
Flood relief in Lagos is their hardest mission yet. By now a large fleet of airships from around the world, under official UN command but with US military logistical coordination, stands ready to help, and soon there are fleets of drones delivering supplies. But none of them can match the crewmen of Jove’s Chariot for dropping down on ropes and extracting dangerously sick people but transportation to hospital ships. It’s a grueling job, up and down, up and down, weeping, panicky relatives, comforting lies by Face as interpreter, perpetual fear of a switchblade in the gut from some crazed flood victim, blood and more blood, as load after load of the sick are hauled up and carried to the hospital ships, with always a few of them dying along the way. And the worst of it is that in the generally well-managed but crowded airspace of the disaster zone, there are no arrangements to prevent collisions between the rescuers on their ropes, and the delivery drones bringing food and medical supplies. There are a lot of injuries, a lot of exhaustion, and soon the tropical diseases begin to strike the crew as well, since they didn’t have time for all the appropriate vaccines. The somewhat obsolescent airship needed a special exemption from maneuverability specs to be allowed into the disaster zone at all, and when the remaining sick are fewer in number, and other airships get prepped to mimic the Jove’s Chariot technique, the exemption is withdrawn. They float out to sea to recover, exhausted, and many of them injured or sick, and there’s a general conviction that they can never do a mission like that again. However, Jake’s contact in the US military tells him they rescued over 14,000 people and saved hundreds of lives.
Alyssa goes home then, talks up the Lagos mission on all the TV talk shows, embarrasses some conservative opponents of amnesty by her ingenuous pleading, and reaps a flood of film offers commensurate with her new and unique kind of star power. Meanwhile, Jake tries to capitalize on the Lagos mission by finding a new niche for Jove’s Chariot in international rescue work, but he finds that their time has passed. The airship is somewhat obsolete, adequate for hauling fish but not maneuverable enough to be allowed into the busy airspace of a disaster zone. Their outlaw status still creates inconvenience. And the crew is getting on in years, and deficient in medical skill for that kind of work. The philanthropies praise them for their “proof of concept” in Lagos, but show no inclination to hire them; rather, they will imitate them using modern airships and training younger crews. So when Alyssa comes back with a Hollywood offer to make a film about the Lagos mission on the decks of the real Jove’s Chariot, with Alyssa D’Angelo playing herself, he sadly accepts showbiz as a kind of retirement.
The movie, in which Captain Jake is played by his real-life rival, Face, is not only a success with audiences, but helps to raise money for the campaign against world hunger, since it’s full of touching scenes of poor people in Nigeria. So Jake accepts a follow-up offer to make a reality TV show, which his friends in the philanthropies anticipate being a great fundraiser for them. And so the world finally gets to know the famous outlaw intimately, almost face to face. For two years the show continues, lively and wholesome, with lots of nature and art and history and music and the glamor of outlawry and exile. One of the regular features of the show is stage plays in Face’s onboard theater, in which original plays sent in by fans all over the world are acted, with Alyssa D’Angelo and Face generally in the leading roles. Officially, Alyssa is still in love with Jake, and her real kisses are for him, with only stage kisses for his rival. But the worldwide gossip gradually decides that she is weakening, giving in to Face, who for the first time in his life is deeply and faithfully in love.
In the winter of 2057 to 2058, Jove’s Chariot recruits a bunch of billionaire passengers for a spectacular world tour, charging millions of dollars for a room, with the proceeds going to the campaign against world hunger. There’s also some hope that such high profile guests will strengthen the push for amnesty. In cities all through Africa, the Middle East and Asia, they put on quite a show, with live music played from a hanging stage, acrobat Mickey Tritt dropping down by rope and crowdsurfing, giant flags towed in slow, revolving motions, and millions of candy parachutes shot out to drift colorfully to the ground, while huge multitudes crowd the streets. Russia offers a very warm welcome, and as the airship cruise is down the west coast of the US, just over the line into international waters, tens of thousands of boats come out to see the famous airship and pay their respects to Captain Jake, hoping to welcome them home. But Congress is too busy to do anything. Also, conspiracy theorists who claim that Jove’s Chariot was never really outlawed, and the whole thing was just a CIA psy-op from the beginning, weaken the pressure for amnesty. The show goes on, and finds another sensational plot point when Jove's Chariot gets in a race to be the first airship to visit both the North Pole and the South Pole. Meanwhile, the lovesick Captain Jake won't propose to Alyssa because he's a homeless outlaw. So Face beats him to it, framing his real life proposal artfully as the climax of one of their stage plays. But Alyssa tells him no, and immediately runs away, finds Jake fixing a thruster over the northern Pacific, and proposes to him instead. The wedding date is set, but Jake has a premonition that it will never happen.
In mid-2058, a famine begins in Taliban-ruled Ethiopia. Freedom fighting rebels control the peripheries of the country and have destroyed most of the outbound roads to stop tanks. So it’s hard for food relief to get in. By this time, the powerful campaign against world hunger has huge airship fleets, more than sufficient to airlift food for 100 million Ethiopians. But the Taliban jihadist empire, loosely ruling from Malaysia to Mauritania, blinded by its own propaganda and afraid that people fed by Western airships will be emboldened to turn against their rule, forbids it, and the West, long accustomed to submitting to Taliban nuclear blackmail, meekly forbids it too. Nonetheless, the alliance of private philanthropies that comprise the campaign strongly consider conducting a massive food relief operation anyway, in defiance of the government of all the countries where they are headquartered. But it's so hard to make up their minds. Many begin to realize that only the star power of Captain Jake can get them over the hump of indecision. Finally, Len Milo, the angel-faced little save-the-world journalist who awakened the world’s conscience to the Ethiopia famine by sneaking into the country and smuggling out myriads of horrible photographs, and a sometime fellow traveler of Jove’s Chariot, stows away on the airship and bursts into a ceremony to present a petition from the world’s humanitarian leaders, pleading with Jake to accept the command role in an illegal food relief airlift in Ethiopia. So begins his last mission.
The Taliban regime could easily blow the airships out of the sky, but they don’t. They let the philanthropies flood the starving country with food, while demanding that the West suppress them. Western governments promise to do so, and some philanthropy leaders do go to exile or jail, and some offices get closed, but it’s all rather ineffectual, perhaps intentionally. The Taliban fear that destroying the hunger relief airships will finally exhaust the patience of the sleeping giant of the West, and indeed, there is a rebellious groundswell of support in the West for Captain Jake and the illegal Ethiopia famine relief airlift. But in due course, it becomes clear that the airlift is stirring up the West, fueling freedom fighting rebels in Ethiopia, and angering the Taliban, bringing the world to the very brink of nuclear war. Jake, in an agony of remorse and bewilderment, turns for advice to his old rival, Face, who is a bit of a geopolitical mastermind, and who has also become a conduit of information and insight from the CIA. It looks like there’s only one way out.
I’ll stop there so as not to give away the whole story!
END PLOT SUMMARY
Now, while I've written a full draft of the novel, just to make sure that nobody starts it, gets hooked, and is left hanging, from my point of view it’s a little like a sculpture that is only half chiseled out of the marble. I’m not actively rewriting it at the moment, and whether I ever will is hard to say, but my imagination circles back to it often, and the version in my mind already differs considerably from the version that I’ve published. Even the plot summary above has details here and there that are taken from my new and improved imaginary version, and not the published version.
On the literary side, I was somewhat constrained by my chosen narrator, Captain Jake's cousin, Tommy Daly, who is a loyal member of the crew through all its adventures, but otherwise undistinguished. Some parts of the story were difficult to put in his voice because he wouldn’t naturally know them, while more generally, it would not be true to his character for the prose to be too insightful or poetic. But I thought of a way around that. My idea is that I'll have him say that he circulated a draft to his old comrades, and then found that it had been added to and even rewritten, he knows not by whom, but as far as he can tell, accurately, so he's publishing it and will let the chips fall where they may. That frees me to let him continue to stand as the everyman of the Flying Republic, while at the same time giving me license to be more like an omniscient narrator.
I think the novel needs much more physical narration and transcribed conversation, and that's partly just a matter of working harder to fill out the picture, and partly of choosing greater technical specificity. At one point, I wanted the novel to represent the dreams of the emergent airship industry as a whole, so that many different aspiring airship makers could project them themselves and the flying machines they're building into the future that it represents. But that won’t quite do, and long before I finished the novel, it was clear that Jove’s Chariot had to embody a lot of specific design choices: lighter than air, not hybrid; hydrogen lifting gas, not helium; hydrogen fuel, not batteries or solar; dual water and air ballast for buoyancy control, etc. And yet I still wanted to avoid going all the way and playing the engineer, and the result is that physical description of the airship that is the setting of the whole novel is very incomplete. In a new version, I’d want the reader to be able to picture themselves on Jove's Chariot’s decks, almost to feel more at home there than in the real world, as readers of The Lord of the Rings soon come to feel the Shire to be much more natural and home-like than the world we know. Also, I’m thinking that the best division of labor between the fictional and non-fictional aspects of the book might be for each chapter to be followed by a technical appendix, easily skipped by readers who just want a good story, but available to demonstrate the feasibility of the airship’s adventures, able to be updated in response to cogent technical criticisms, hopefully with minimal changes to the plot, yet fulfilling a contract with the reader for the technological realism of the story
If I’m very lucky, maybe the staff at LTA Research will decide to work with me to make Jove’s Chariot an accurate sketch of their dreams!
Meanwhile, the main value of the novel right now is to mine it for lots and lots of use cases. Remote mining. Flood relief. Firefighting. Exploration. Rescue of shipwrecked mariners at sea. Shipping all sorts of things, especially big bulky things, and especially to remote places with little infrastructure. Shipping big reactors. Shipping tunnel boring machines that can dig subway systems through rock. Shipping art. Rescuing wild animals. Hauling fish from fishing boats at sea to distribution centers on land. Logging. Spectacular tourist experiences. Hang gliding. Bungee jumping. Dazzling up close viewing of wildlife. Famine relief, even without infrastructure, and an unprecedented scale. Spectacular public entertainments. Secretive gunrunning by night. Logistics service to islands. Logistics service to artificial islands comprised of ships strung together. Logistics service to cruise ships at sea. Antipiracy operations And so forth. Jove's Chariot does it all, and that’s what the breakthrough of the giant airship industry can unleash to enrich humanity’s future.
What You Can Do to Help
This post isn’t just entertainment or information, but practical advocacy. I want to mobilize. But what does that mean for you? If you’ve been convinced to want to make this happen, what should you do?
Of course, it depends on who you are. In a sense, there are as many answers to the question as there are people, since everyone’s skills, contacts, insights, time and money are different. But that’s not very helpful. What can be generalized?
I’ll target my advocacy to three different classes of people. Since social stratification nowadays, though as necessary as ever, is surreptitious and inarticulate, I’ll try to convey my meaning with the help of some anachronistic medieval lingo and call them “kings,” “peasants,” and “knights.” I’ll help apply those categories to contemporary circumstances. And my advice to each class, roughly, is:
To kings: BUILD
To peasants: BUZZ
To knights: NETWORK
And one more:
To the non-believers: PROVE ME WRONG
To Kings: Build
By kings, I mean, first of all, billionaires.
Private billionaires, more than anyone else, have the freedom of action to dream up and execute big projects. In foreign countries, political leaders are often like kings, with a freedom of action comparable to private billionaires in the United States, since they can use public power in the service of private fancy to some extent. I hesitate to give them advice since I don't really approve of such concentration of power in individual hands without democratic accountability, but for what it's worth, many political leaders abroad could probably initiate the Airship Age, action as princely patrons of progress, modern counterparts of Prince Henry the Navigator. In democracies, congressmen and senators and heads of major governments agencies are sometimes kinglike, though the analogy doesn't quite fit because the power model is more collective. But some of these political big guns might be proper protagonists of the Airship Age. Add CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, top celebrities, top venture capitalists and some heads of major foundations to the list of “kings.”
To all these, I say: build if you can. If it’s really in your reach to build giant airships, that's likely the best way you can convert a fortunate position in the commanding heights of 21st-century global capitalism into a lasting positive legacy that will benefit multitudes, including many of the poorest of the human race. But don't underestimate the difficulty or the risk. It’s a multi-billion dollar investment journey all told, and even the stepping stones will take huge strides to reach. A million here and a million there can't build giant airships. This is a “go big or go home” game. Don't try to be a king unless you have hundreds of millions that you can afford to lose, and a lot of your own intelligence or trusted advisors’. Of course, your best way to build might be to acquire one of the various impecunious ventures that the dreamer-engineers of the airship community have been perennially starting.
Two more caveats for the “kings.”
First, your purpose is to spark the Airship Age, not rule it. Once the breakthrough takes place, and money starts flowing, and public opinion starts believing and getting excited, expect copycats galore. Some of the followers will probably beat the pioneers, playing Google to their AltaVista. That doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Be prepared to accept eclipse gracefully. It's more important to change the course of history for the better than to be an empire builder.
Second, if you fail, it matters how. If you spread a powerful vision and then share all your data, you can help the airship breakthrough for others.
To Peasants: Make a Buzz of a Public Opinion Excitement
Ordinary working stiffs who live paycheck to paycheck, whose jobs are something less than adventurous, and who don't have much left to give after putting food on the table and raising their kids, do most of the living and dying and enjoying and suffering in healthy civilized societies. They are the bedrock. “Peasant,” as I’ll use the word, is not an insult. It's most people and a worthy thing to be. And plenty of peasants are pretty happy.
Peasants don't have enough money or clout to launch giant airship construction. But to see how they can help, consider that public opinion means mainly peasant opinion, ordinary working stiff opinion, and yet it moves kings. Most celebrities and billionaires seem to care about their image. Most of the readership of the internet are peasants too, elite journalists care about clicks and publish for the crowds, and even educated elites rely on mainstream media to supply much of their news and opinions. So the peasantry has a lot of power through what they think and talk about.
Now, most people seem to know little or nothing about airships, but to the extent they have an impression at all, I think they often regard them as silly. They were tried, and they failed, as the Hindenburg accident proved, and all those who worked on them or invested in them are a little bit ridiculous, and trying to revive them now is an absurd anachronism. This is such a stupid attitude to take that it’s only possible because people think about airships so little. It should be possible to correct it.
So my advice to peasants is, first of all, to change your attitude and wish for the Airship Age, and talk about it, so that eventually you help to create a buzz of excitement, dispel some silly old prejudices, and make the world want to see giant zeppelins in the sky.
Second is money. Individually, peasants don't have enough money to help much, but collectively, they have more than the billionaires. The Zeppelin Company, in the early 20th century, was twice rescued from financial ruin but creative crowdfunding, motivated by German nationalism and futurist enthusiasm, and later the flights of the Graf Zeppelin, never profitable per se, made money from stamp collectors, who paid extra for stamps that had been on board the famous zeppelin. So keep an eye out for opportunities to participate in creative crowdfunding for airship ventures.
Third, if a giant airship comes to your town, go see it and cheer.
Fourth, don't get spooked by the memory of the Hindenburg and demand from politicians that they impose stultifying and unnecessary regulations, or tolerate people who do make such demands. Progress involves a bit of risk, but it can be largely limited to consenting subjects. Sometimes deregulation is courage.
Fifth, be a customer if you get the chance. Do it for the sake of progress and prosperity, even if it's a little bit risky at first.
To return to the forest fire analogy: peasants can't light the spark, but they can make the leaves a little drier.
To the Knights of the Knowledge Economy: Network for the Strength to Make it Happen
There is a sense in which every society or organization is inevitably an aristocracy.
Kings not only can't do all the work, but can't make all the decisions. They need to delegate, and those whom they delegate to— call them “knights”— can be more important, collectively, than the kings, especially if they have some integrity, freedom of action, and shared culture. Their ethos does as much as anything to define a society’s character and possibilities.
On the other hand, there is no such thing, logically speaking, as the will of the majority. In any multi-issue space, the majority decision is demonstrably indeterminate. Collective action requires coordination. Networks need nodes where links converge for efficient connectivity. Both the mere distribution of talent and the social need for hierarchy mean that a majority of the effective work is done by a minority of the people. Hence aristocracy.
“Networking” has an ignoble, mercenary, shallow ring to it. “Friendship” sounds noble and virtuous and generous and fulfilling. Yet networking sounds professional, whereas friendship is felt to be more an aspect of one's personal life. It's considered more or less proper to do business with or hire through one's network, one's professional contacts. But it's held to be vaguely improper for staff in large organizations, especially in the public sector, to prefer hiring or doing business with their friends. All this is somewhat artificial, and somewhat unfortunate. It's good for professional contacts to have the common purposes and mutual respect and generosity— and at times a certain kind of stimulating rivalry as well— that would make them friends. This intermingling of professional collaboration with personal lives and friendship is too natural to be suppressed, and is a powerful force for creativity and progress. It naturally rises, if not to the top, then high up. And it's a critical element in any good aristocracy.
And this brings me to my third class, which I like to call the information class. These people are, so to speak, the “knights” of the knowledge economy, in whom, more than anyone else, the integrity and ingenuity of capitalism reside. Instead of knightings they have graduations, and instead of lances they wield laptops, and their crusades are against ignorance and poverty rather than Saracens, but they resemble the knights of old in being today's indispensable instruments for wielding power, while at the same time possessing their own ethos and much freedom of action. The “kings,” the CEOs and celebrities and bureaucratic bigwigs and billionaires, need the information class “knights” to staff their organizations and realize their plans and visions. Often the power elites rely on the information class as much for ideation as for implementation. Kings have power and fame; knights have prowess, honor, and reputation. Knights usually serve kings, but at will, even on their own terms, not as slaves, and they are fit to keep them company and advise them, often speaking to them as equals or even for some purposes as superiors, with the authority of expertise.
For more about the information class, read my post The Author as a Case Study in the Educated Elite.
Anyway, my appeal to the information class knights is that they network for the idea of airships, invest some of their reputation in it, and establish friendships and societies of dreamers around it, ready to be activated and mobilized when opportunities arise. They can perhaps make the most difference of all, because it's they who can form the kinds of teams that can exercise persistent, proactive, creative, rigorous intelligence, conceiving and championing and executing major projects. Kings can order it, or fund it, peasants can cheer, but knights, in my sense, are the ones who can really make it happen. So let’s network.
And please contact me in particular. I'm somewhat known, I think, and reasonably well-respected in the airship community, even if my ability to engage has been a bit intermittent. I may be able to help you achieve any ambitions you may have. No promises, but I'll see what I can do. It's always a pleasure to connect with people of my own class, and share big ideas. And a good blog comment discussion today could become a world-beating company in ten or twenty years. So please, fellow knights of the knowledge economy, jump into the comments and make yourselves known! Let's network!
To the Non-believers: Prove Me Wrong
Finally, if you’re not convinced, please tell me why.
It's natural to extrapolate from experience and assume that things have to be the way they are, even if history proves otherwise. Such incredulity arising from mere mental inertia is a pardonable vice, from which perhaps no one is quite free. We should all do our best to fight it, but it's not worth talking about much. Probably most readers of this post will disbelieve it for no reason. Never mind.
But others may think they have definite reasons to disbelieve what I'm saying here, and that's extremely valuable. I want to hear the reasons. I'll bet I can refute them, but if not, your well-warranted doubts might save a lot of people’s time and money. Do you think you know reasons why airships can't be a trillion-dollar industry? Please, please, please tell me about it. Let's debate.
Postscript
This is more a note to self than anything else, but here are the chapter headings of the new version of Jove's Chariot that I've sketched out in my mind:
Jove's Chariot Planned Outline
The Airshipman
The First Mission
The Storm
The Flying Republic of Outlaws
Triumph in Lusaka
Meet the Founders
The Age of the Sea Airships
Jake's Romance
Father Clancy
Privations and Hazards
The Inheritance
The Jungle
Hell's Gate
A Shotgun Marriage
The Long Vacation
The Lost Treasure of Fossyzalibanga
Airship Cowboys
The Johnny Appleseed Years
Fellow Travelers
Mickey Tritt
The Naturalist
The Artist
The Robin Hood Engineer
The Master Swordsman
The Rescuers
The Pirate Hunters
The Accidental Empire
The Shark
The Camelot Years
The Castle in the Clouds
The Grim Plain of Dardamoor
The Gunrunners
The Homecoming is Canceled
The Antarctica Gold Rush
The Man of the World
The Ends of the Earth
Alyssa D'Angelo
Lagos
Showbiz
The Billionaires’ World Tour
The North Pole
Two Proposals
The Last Debate
The Ethiopia Airlift
A Blaze of Glory
The Face of a Saint