u/Airships-R-Awesome

Silent: Imagine sailing above the clouds with almost no noise other than the wind whistling across surface of the ship and a gentle roll as it hits a patch of turbulence. You hear the trilling call of birds and out the window you watch the passing flock of sandhill cranes as they migrate north for the winter. This would be a reality with electric propulsion that the passengers of old-era airships never knew.

Sustainable: if an airship had a solar array on its outer skin powering a battery bank running electric motors for propulsion, the range could be incredible - if efficient enough and if wind currents were used well enough - they would never need to come down.

You look down through an opening in the clouds and see the patchwork of farmland - not moving too fast so as to miss the details. On a sailboat you have ample time to enjoy the scenery of the ocean around you. Perhaps on an airship you could appreciate the beauty of flight.

Is this a reasonable comparison?

We still can only make carbon nanotubes (implications for space elevators or airship structures) in a lab in very small quantities and our spaceships need shielding from thermal damage during climbout/ re-entry.

Have we exhausted our options for new and better materials because we already know all the possible elements from the periodic table?

We dream of being a space fairing civilization, but the ships that we see in sci-fi are not possible with our current materials.

What am I missing here?