20
votes
Around the world in 80 days ... sustainably
21st century version of the Jules Verne classic.
No new carbon added to the atmosphere.
Piece of cake? Impossible? Doable?
Discuss...
21st century version of the Jules Verne classic.
No new carbon added to the atmosphere.
Piece of cake? Impossible? Doable?
Discuss...
So, I'm kinda fascinated that the obvious answer doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone.
Sailboats.
There is literally a "Jules Verne" around the world sailboat race. The current record is just over 40 days ... which is freaking insane ... sailboats maintaining an average speed of over 30+ mph, for weeks straight.
Still, I like exploring this idea from an "everyman" perspective, not multimillion dollar yachts crewed by world class sailors ... and also, considering the Jules Verne-like aspect of using multiple different modes of travel, elephants and airships and bicycles and whatnot.
PS: 25,000-ish miles around the world, 80 days ... that works out to an average of only 13-14 mph ... so it's not as difficult as it might sound.
If you start doing any kind of driving, let alone cycling or riding horses/elphants/dog-sleds, it gets difficult. The numbers go up to 25-40 mph the moment you're stopping to sleep/rest. If you're going for the "everyman" perspective, you also don't gain time during sailing the oceans between the continents. Doing an Atlantic/Pacific crossing in an "everyman" sail boat will certainly drop you below 14 mph, too. Hull speed of a 40' yacht is only 9 mph, so you'd need a fast catamaran or a hydrofoil monster (or a >80' mega-yacht).
So we'd have to get more creative. I like the original air ship idea, so I vote solar powered helium/hydrogen Zeppelin. That thing should make good time, so you probably can cycle across Europe or sail across the Atlantic at a more leisurely pace.
In what world is a solar powered helium/hydrogen Zeppelin more obtainable than a racing catamaran for the "everyman" 😂
Ah no, I was just pointing out that we'll spend millions anyway, so my vote is doing something new!
Driving/cycling/riding can easily be included by hiring someone else to do some-or-all of the actual navigation while you sleep. Requires some planning and money, but still much more feasible than buying/renting a super-yacht, and I feel like that is still well within the Jules Verne spirit of the venture.
I'm contesting the "easily". Crossing Eurasia and/or America on a muscle powered vehicle at an average speed of 14 mph is going to be difficult. The cheapest way would be a tandem bike pulling a trailer for at least one sleeper, and then rotating people to pedal, possibly hiring new pedal-ers frequently. But 14 mph long distance with a large bike trailer excludes large portions of the population, you'd basically need to pre-arrange fresh cycling athletes (and food, water and shelter for them) all along the route - without emissions. And both America and Eurasia have some very remote areas you'd need to cross. Also, the pace is fast enough that even world class athletes won't be able to follow you on their race bikes for long. Doable at large effort and expense for North America and Europe, but logistically close to impossible for large parts of Asia - just because of road conditions.
I think we can exclude draft animals, 14 mph would be a permanent fast canter for a horse. This means switching horses hundreds of times along the route, and horses are more difficult to hire and transport than humans.
With the racing catamaran, you'd at least have to do the hiring/renting only once, and logistics like bringing food and water are trivial.
Kinda related, but Chad Caruso skateboarded across the U.S. a couple years ago. It's fully documented on his YT channel. A documentary was released this year.
Obviously it would be better to bike, but this was very low impact. At least with America, this is a proven solution
It's been done with a single plane over a year and a half, with a lot of time lost to repairs and whatnot.
https://aroundtheworld.solarimpulse.com/adventure
One could do it in a fraction of the time with pre-planned and proactive maintenance, or with multiple planes each doing a leg of the trip. You'd probably bend sustainability a little unless the manufacturing process is carbon neutral, but down that path lies madness.
Because this is a fun thought experiment, I think the whole lifecycle (manufacturing, repair, and ultimately disposal..) of whatever one's using for this trip would be valuable to consider for more wholistic sustainability. Not that I have a lifecycle assessment of solar planes on hand, but I vote take the path where madness lies :D
I considered this, too ... but full lifecycle sustainability quickly leads to "sustainability of your food/water sources, of the clothes you wear during the trip, all services you might procure along the way" etc ... feels, yeah, a bit excessive.
Plus -- a bit of a cop-out, I admit -- but if the vehicle is built using unsustainable methods, it is still already built, and you making use of it in part of your trip still does not actually add to the atmospheric carbon load, so you know ... close enough.
Some anecdotes :
I wonder if the Piccard name was borrowed for Jean-Luc Picard from the Star Trek franchise...
If I recall, Jean-Luc Picard was named after Jacques Piccard, who was Bertrand's father
I think you could do it. If you hopped aboard shipping vessels there wouldn't really be any new emissions. You can do it, it's just pretty expensive. Going port to port you could probably do that in 80 days. If you also illegally hopped on freight rail along with the shipping vessels you could probably do it even faster as long as you weren't arrested. But those are kind of boring.
I'd recommend adding a second category for fun, sustainable travel: Around the world in 300 days. If you had 300 days it would be much more feasible to do it via bike and hobby sailboat. There are lots of website where you can sign up to crew a recreational sailboat and bike touring is very easy to get into.
I think using planned battery swap stations, having been pre-charged via solar energy, a trip that produces no new carbon emissions in relation to the transportation method used during the course of the trip would be possible. Both air and watercraft designs are advanced enough to have electric only propulsion systems. Great topic btw.
So I'm going to be difficult and say that sustainability is less about negating an individuals impact and more about building infrastructure to minimize collective consumption. Theres navigating the earth for the sake of it and doing so with no emissions would be objectively better than alternatives. But there's still the cost of the vehicle and parts and food and everything else that will not be offset in service of a single journey. I know the corporate idea of carbon offsets are a scam, but I'd still argue that the cost/benefit of solar would make transportating panels and inverters by diesel ship "more sustainable" than a joyride around the world. (Provided it's leveraged and used effectively)
My idea for a sort of net zero/positive journey was a global trade and aid convoy. Obviously you'd want to minimize emissions with solar/electric vehicles and possibly have them designed to take advantage of rail infrastructure when available. But I want to believe that there's a scale at which the bulk value delivery to countless small communities is offsets by all of the individual trips not taken. And with consistency, a convoy like this could develop into a utility by itself with its own culture, skills and services. Over time the route itself becomes critical infrastructure for everyone on it and that incentivizes investment in maintenance and security.
(Also I cheated and just used the premise of a solarpunk Silk Road TTRPG game I ran. It was inverse Snowpiercer and with Star Trek vibes.)
Something else I realized reading your comment. Someone using a single vehicle possibly uses less resources overall compared to them living in an apartment/house, going to work, etc. Of course there are the materials to build the vehicle and maintain it. A house will cost more as far as initial build goes, though maintaining a house costs less resources.
I am honestly not sure which way the scale eventually goes. Just some idle musing from my side.
I think this topic needs a fundamental mindset shift because it took a very long time to realize maximum output/value does not equate to maximum profit. We consider expense and liability by accounting for opportunity cost in perpetuity, but a lot of the time value creation is only accounted for in the period it happened and without accounting for the opportunities it enabled. Some people go so far as to consider high value spending as a bad thing because is denies repeat business.
Nuclear powered submarine perhaps?
Since "around the world" isn't a strictly defined term, we can make this easy on ourselves. Most people wouldn't insist on sticking to the equator for the trip and would accept a trip along the Tropic of Cancer, for example. Extrapolating to absurdity from this, the simplest way is to get to the south pole by whatever means*, then "circumnavigate" the globe with a leisurely stroll around said pole.
*Yes, that part is complicated, but since it's not technically part of our trip around the world I'm counting only the circumnavigation itself.
This reminds me of one of my favorite excerpts from a novel. From the Split Infinity trilogy by Piers Anthony, there is a high-stakes game of, like, science riddles.
One contestant asks another, "where on Earth can you walk south one mile, east one mile, and north one mile -- and end up back where you started"?
The other contestant quickly answers with "the north pole" ... and then counter-challenges with "where else on Earth--besides the north pole--can you do that"?
And the answer to the counter-challenge is, basically, what you just described ... starting at a point approximately 1 1/3 miles north of the south pole, walk south a mile, then east a mile -- all the way around the world -- then north a mile, retracing your steps back to your starting point.
No such thing as traveling sustainably.
I mean, you could walk.
But all that CO2 you're breathing out while you walk? Horrible for the environment...
You call it an environmental hazard, I call it organic free-range plant food with no pesticides.
Maybe I misunderstood this post completely but was it not being asked about 80 days..? You would have to walk 30 km/h 24/7.
Really only 20 kph ... of course, you'd also have to swim that fast for a portion of the trip.
Walking, cycling and sailing are all methods of travel that come to mind. That is just starting with the obvious.
And here I was thinking my comment was the obvious one.
You can't travel around the world in 80 days sustainably..
I guess it isn't that obvious, as you clearly have a different idea of sustainable in mind. Mind you, I responded to your statement about there being no sustainable travel period. Mind expanding on why you believe that to be case?
Edit: I just saw your other comment, apparently you intended it in the context of 80 days. I still think sailing might be an option there, but fair enough I guess. Though I had some additional thoughts about it here as well.