Imagine the life-raft bundled around a central high powered air pump and heating unit which could deploy in seconds and heat enough air to generate the lifting power to get 6-10 adults/children (plus raft/heater/pump) in the raft to 15 meters in air within the remaining time before the wall of water/debris crushes you all. You would only need to maintain that altitude for long enough to get a tow from a helicopter (or drone) to safety or for the waters to recede.
It's doesn't seem like an easy engineering problem and I didn't even do any back of the envelope calculations to see the power required to lift 1000-1500lbs 15 meters in 10 minutes, but my gut says it's totally within the realm of our current engineering capabilities.
If we could build such a device that could be mass-produced for a reasonable cost and deployed en masse to schools and other highly populated areas within the subduction zone, it could potentially save thousands of lives that would otherwise have 0 chance of survival.
The problems that would need solving and the potential life-saving potential has me kind of excited and my brain is already getting ahead of itself thinking Kickstarter. So if you or anyone else would like to talk some more about this, I'd be more than game to start getting technical.
If anyone sees a glaringly obvious problems in this, please don't hesitate to call it out rather than just rolling eyes and moving on... wish I'd put this up when it was still on the front page.
So imagine you take one of these - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(shipboard)#/media/Fi...
Then combine it with one of these - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_balloon#/media/File:Clo...
Imagine the life-raft bundled around a central high powered air pump and heating unit which could deploy in seconds and heat enough air to generate the lifting power to get 6-10 adults/children (plus raft/heater/pump) in the raft to 15 meters in air within the remaining time before the wall of water/debris crushes you all. You would only need to maintain that altitude for long enough to get a tow from a helicopter (or drone) to safety or for the waters to recede.
It's doesn't seem like an easy engineering problem and I didn't even do any back of the envelope calculations to see the power required to lift 1000-1500lbs 15 meters in 10 minutes, but my gut says it's totally within the realm of our current engineering capabilities.
If we could build such a device that could be mass-produced for a reasonable cost and deployed en masse to schools and other highly populated areas within the subduction zone, it could potentially save thousands of lives that would otherwise have 0 chance of survival.
The problems that would need solving and the potential life-saving potential has me kind of excited and my brain is already getting ahead of itself thinking Kickstarter. So if you or anyone else would like to talk some more about this, I'd be more than game to start getting technical.
If anyone sees a glaringly obvious problems in this, please don't hesitate to call it out rather than just rolling eyes and moving on... wish I'd put this up when it was still on the front page.