Solarpunk

Adventurers on solar bikes choosing their course through Eurasia. Inspired by unassisted yacht races around the world, the Sun Trip is writing a new page in the world of overland adventures.

The Sun Trip is a showcase for new forms of mobility. Each adventurer is an ambassador of solar energy and eco-mobility, proving their efficiency and their humanist dimension.

GAZA -- A man in the Gaza Strip is using solar panels to clean water for his neighbors – a seemingly small gesture that has large consequences at a time when the region is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

"Yesterday, I filled this car with clean water from the well, 6,500 liters, and distributed it among people in need of water," Mohammed Assalia told ABC News. "Some people use these wheelchairs to transport the water they fill, which is kinda sad but it does the thing."

As the resource becomes more scarce, Assalia said he is now looking for a way to reach more people in the most devastated area of the Gaza Strip, six months since Israel declared war on Hamas. The high costs involved with the project may hinder his ability to do so without help, he says.

"With the solar-powered well in my house, at least 1,000 people benefited and received clean water every day," Assalia said. "Now people from other neighborhoods have come to use it and we're trying to help more by operating as many wells as possible."

I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a "firewall" layer between news and ourselves?

I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said "when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest". I feel it could become the norm.

EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.

EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as "incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!". The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.

I came across the idea of creating a social network whose purpose it is to connect you with people in your area/neighbourhood. Such a network would also be managed by someone in your neighbourhood and would be aimed at creating in-person connections, making people meet and come together.

Such a network is the perfect opposite of currently widespread "social" network platforms, which mostly aim to engage users online as much as possible, ultimately at the cost of direct interactions. These networks are also centrally controlled and usually come with algorithms that steer conversation into inflammatory directions.

Even the open source and federated alternatives to these platforms often only change the centralised and closed part but still maintain most of the attention-taking design that I don't see as ideal.

In my vision of a local network (as I will call it for this post), people should be able to find others nearby with similar interests and be supported in meeting up for activities, sharing/exchanging goods or services and more. Creating something like this is tricky, it needs to be very useful and shouldn't become a time sink of its own, however it should still be attractive enough for people to actually want to use it.

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions what are some helpful and necessary features or aspects to keep in mind, and perhaps even more critically, what should not be present?

Looking forward to your thoughts!

Bonus ideas:

• Such local networks could still federate, so neighbourhood networks could federate on some level to connect larger areas in a city. What should federate, and how far?
• Local networks can also be hosted on non-internet networks like Freifunk since they are geographically based in a small area. This can also improve resilience of such networks in catastrophic situations.
• Is there a good way that geographically more spread-out groups of activists, perhaps even in different countries, could make use of such networks? (How) Can this be compatible with keeping it simultaneously locally rooted and local-first?

I have been following them for a few years and they are making some slow and steady progress

From their page: As the world generates more electricity from intermittent renewable energy sources, there is a growing need for technologies which can capture and store energy during periods of low demand and release it rapidly when required.

At Gravitricity we are developing innovative, long-life, underground technologies which store energy safely and deliver it on demand at a lower lifetime cost than current alternatives.

Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.

Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.

People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.

Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.

Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.

Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions---things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis---while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.

Very mainstream coverage, but I guess it's not too bad from that perspective. And yes, green skyscrapers are a stupid idea.

One of my goals for my postcard series is to show a rebuilding society that prioritizes reducing waste and externalities, and examining what weird technologies might appeal to them because of those goals/limitations. So I've been wanting to do a scene of a caustic soda locomotive ever since I first heard about them.

Soda locomotives were a type of fireless steam locomotive that barely made it out of the prototype phase, where the boiler is surrounded by a tank of ‘caustic soda’ (usually one of several possible chemicals), which generates heat when mixed with water. The heat produces steam in the boiler, which is used to drive the pistons, but instead of being released, its condensed and added to the soda to create more heat. This goes on until the soda gets too dilute to produce more heat, but it can be 'recharged' by drying it out again.

These never really took off because it took more coal to dry the soda at the station than to just run a conventional steam locomotive, and electric trains quickly came into their own and filled the niche of quiet, low-pollution trains for inside cities and tunnels.

But I feel like these could pair well with solar steam generators (another late-1800’s design) stationed along the tracks, to create analogue, solar-powered trains. These could run on existing unpowered tracks, without requiring any new electrical infrastructure, just the isolated drying stations.

The train crew would just exchange wet soda for dry and start again (looks like that took about 45 minutes). The cool thing is that this arrangement could be asyncronous - the station can dry out the caustic soda, then store it for when the train shows up. The train can run on cloudy days or at night, as long as they get enough sunny days to dry out big batches of soda at the stops along the way. And the solar concentrators can be huge and optimized for their location because they don’t have to move.

The focus of these postcards isn’t on technological utopias so much as on societies that are reexamining how to do things as they rebuild, anachronistically combining all kinds of tech. So trains and solar concentrators built with 1800’s technology seem like an easier starting place.

The concentrators require fairly simple materials (mirrors or polished metal) and math to make (plus some simple mechanical timing or basic motors/electronics to get them to follow the sun without a human turning a crank).

Most of the descriptions I've seen of drying the caustic soda mention pumping superheated steam through the dilute mix from another (coal) boiler, so it seems like you could use almost any design from the earliest solar steam generators to something like these modern ones depending on the society’s manufacturing capabilities. The solar concentrator/boiler I referenced for the art is a design from 1901.

(The most common modern design for solar steam generation I've seen is that sort of mirrored-trough-and-vaccum-lined-tube system. I mostly went with the big round reflector because I was worried the trough design wouldn't read as distinct from photovoltaic panels in this art style.)

The trains could run with minimal pollution using these simple technologies, and even if their range is lower, or they're not as fast, that might be a trade off this society would accept.

Ideally they would use existing tracks and passenger or freight cars, and only need new infrastructure around whatever station fueled them up on their route (or at a destination). I think this applies to the compressed air locomotives just as well as the caustic soda ones.

(If you don’t like the idea of caustic soda locomotives, but you still want this idea to work, another option with a shorter range is compressed air locomotives. Instead of drying the soda, the station would be using a solar steam engine or windmill or water wheel to run an air compressor, steadily filling a tank which would be used to top up locomotives on their route. This would still allow for isolated infrastructure to power a train along unpowered rails. IRL these mostly saw use in mines.)

The locomotive in the scene is based on a real-life fireless locomotive. They’re similar, but filled with super-hot steam by external sources. They seemed like a good reference for what a caustic soda locomotive might have looked like had the concept reached a more polished, production format. But they don’t really fit my goal for tolerating intermittency as they’d need the heat source to be going when they stopped for a refill.

During the Little Ice Age, Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/10318840

The herbal solidarity project resisting state oppression

Alternative Invidious Link (though I would recommend watching in 4k if you can, due to the way compression garbles some of the animation at points).

Alternative version in French

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7878389

I’m not sure why but I’ve always found the Civil Defense to be really cool, and I often try to work it into my stories in one form or another (though none of those have been published yet). When I was helping with reorganizing FA!’s box text on the military, I thought it’d be a good addition.

It fulfills the role of being an organized, primarily civilian, primarily voluntary disaster relief organization. It has a long history in dozens of countries, in one form or another, all around the world. Its provided training, search and rescue, preventative measures, emergency response, and recovery, in everything from wars, to natural disasters, and even the Chernobyl disaster. And the different formats used in all those countries give us a historical precident for almost any organizational structure we choose. Want to make it an auxiliary of a military branch? The US did that at some points. Directly part of the military? Some Soviet countries ran it that way. A purely civilian volunteer charity? Britain has recently revived theirs and is running it like that. They can even function as a volunteer militia, like the British home guard, or the American Civil Air Patrol who Wikipedia claims once dropped bombs on axis submarines.

And they have history. People like that kind of lineage, the sense of being part of something that dug people out of rubble in the blitz, that cleared radioactive debris in Chernobyl. There's a long history of sacrifice and service to draw on. And one with comparatively few atrocities on the record.

They're even pretty cool visually. They have the iconic blue triangle motif common in most countries, and a blue and white color scheme not really associated with combat.

Whether you need someone to respond to wildfires, to assist paramedics, to build levees in a flood, or to distribute and build tornado shelters, it's not a far leap from what they've already done. Like Noir said on the discord, given the scale of the Global Climate Wars in the game’s backstory, it seems pretty likely that every government on the planet would start handing out shovels and white helmets again.

And I think it fits the anarchist influences in solarpunk. Putting some of the responsibilities and capabilities for disaster relief back in the hands of the community. It's also a decent role for a varied cast of characters in a RPG. People with regular lives and skills who can be tasked with a quest and be granted some degree of official legitimacy.

When I wrote up the Civil Defense section for the game manual, I tried to provide enough flexibility to allow players and GMs the option to adjust the local Civil Defense chapter to fit their campaign. I like the idea of modern chapters tracing their lineage to different local groups, a postwar militia here, a wildland fire fighter unit there. Like the Defense served as a way to bring various factions (especially armed ones) into the fold, providing them with improved legitimacy in trade for increasing oversight and standardization. So while they’re supplied and trained by the same organization, at the unit level they have some leeway in how they operate and what they specialize in, which can conveniently fit any campaign that wants to use them.

I'm always looking for things to add to my RSS reader! I loved the Hundred Rabbits site that was posted here recently and thought others might have some nice submissions.

I recently found Sunshine and Seedlings which is substack, alas, but has some great content.

I'm also a fan of Low-tech Magazine.

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

• We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.
• We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.
• At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.
• The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.
• Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.
• Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.
• Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.
• Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.
• Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.
• Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.
• Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.
• Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.
• Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.
• Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.
• Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.
• Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.
• Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.
• The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:
  • 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)
  • Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
  • Appropriate technology
  • Art Nouveau
  • Hayao Miyazaki
  • Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world
  • High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs
• Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.
• Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.
• In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
• Solarpunk:
  • is diverse
  • has room for spirituality and science to coexist
  • is beautiful
  • can happen. Now!