Honestly a utility vehicle that isn’t a surveillance box is like all I want from an electric vehicle

This is very cool! Congratulations on your progress!

Slightly related - has the printer filament been affected by the (I’m guessing) humidity of the room? I was always told you had to keep it dry to get good results.

The genre name might not be common knowledge (and I’m not sure that’s the case) but cyberpunk aesthetics and themes and plot points have infiltrated so much of modern science fiction that cyberpunk communities frequently have trouble drawing a line around genre works vs mainstream scifi. And this is after companies and brand marketing “picked it too early” and made it a joke in the 90s. It just sort of kept going quietly, looked more and more prescient, and in the end, it had suffused through so many imaginations and works that it kind of was the mainstream.

I’m not sure the same thing will happen with solarpunk but given the way cyberpunk seems to have acclimatized us to our current distopia, I sort of hope solarpunk can do something similar. Maybe wear the rough edges and propaganda fears off building a society that actually looks out for its people and the habitats they live in.

Hi! I’m not sure I see the link but I’d love to check it out! (The post title just links to the image)

That’s a good idea! I do that with peanut butter at a fancy grocery store - I wonder if there’s one around that does juice

I hadn’t realized how lucky we were - we have one of those crunchy refill stores in town, where you can bring your own containers and buy various powders and liquids (primarily cleaning supplies though they do some seasonings as well. I wish I could buy orange juice that way (I basically gave up on drinking it because I didn’t need any more plastic bottles). We switched to various dilutions of castile soap for most things, and a generic dishwasher powder for our little countertop rig.

Thanks!

I do have thoughts on that! This might be a little jumbled as it’s mostly off the cuff, but I think how much a society can be run only on renewable materials will depend on how much they’re willing to change their whole default framework, and what they’re prepared to give up in the short and long term to do it. Degrowth and library economy concepts would certainly apply. (I really like library economy stuff because I really like reuse).

I think there’s an abundance of resources, from existing usable items to raw materials which have already been extracted already accessable to us out in the world.

Right now there’s this default pipeline from extracted raw material to new (ideally fragile/flimsy/disposable) products to landfill. A library economy on steroids might include both tons of long-term reuse of whatever’s already been made, but also recycling of available materials that have already been extracted. There’ll always have to be new manufacture but ideally it’d be much reduced and anything made new would be designed to last and to be fixable. But that takes a ton of commitment on a societal level to using less and to sorting and distributing everything that already exists. It means mining junkyards and landfills for already-extracted raw materials and generally changing how we do things.

When it comes to energy, I think there’s a sort of hurdle we have to get over - first we need to get most of our energy to renewable, then we can optimize for long term repairability. There’s a lot of interesting recycling processes ramping up for solar panels, and as I understand it, there are less-efficient designs that are more fixable. So for the short term, I suspect whatever designs get the job done we use, and after that, we can start adjusting for long term.

My art tends to be of a society that’s as obsessed with reuse and externalities as ours is with money. They’re a society of scavengers and fixers and makers. That handwaved cultural change is sort of what I’ve chosen for my spec fix suspension of disbelief. Most of the tech I include already exists, but examining what a society that makes all its decisions around reducing harm would do with them is what I really enjoy.

They’ve been doing a bunch of cool solarpunk art for a bit, and they’ve started releasing it CC-BY (I think) including on wikimedia commons, which is great because otherwise the solarpunk category over there was mostly a bunch of AI art and proposed flags. (I’d added some of my photobashes so it wasn’t just AI representing the genre, but I’m very glad to have them contributing art with a lot of intent behind it.) I think a lot of the planning for their scenes comes from the solarpunk prompts podcast these days.

Hugely in favor of helping solarpunk concepts reach people across language barriers! And very interested to see solarpunk stuff from DACH. Having a community here might help ease them into the rest of the instance too

Best of luck!

Oh, one more to consider: Reckoning Press is more climate fiction than explicitly solarpunk, but it was one of the things that got me to give solarpunk a chance.

Ecotopia is a fun one because it hits all the notes but predates the genre.

Murder in the Tool Library is a favorite of mine because the setting is awesome and aspirational while feeling real and human, and because the murder mystery plot is a change from the usual ecofiction.

The solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated! is free (libre and gratis) and has several sections devoted to its setting and worldbuilding that helped me understand a bunch of solarpunk concepts by seeing them in practice and to start thinking much bigger with my own fiction. It also has some good advice on creating engaging plots in an aspirational solarpunk setting where a lot of the usual problems have been solved.

That’s interesting, even going with modern tech, it’s a neat answer to preserving darkness. Military-grade passive night vision with the analogue tubes are ridiculously expensive but you wouldn’t need them just for walking around - simple infrared spotlight goggles are way cheaper, and probably lighter, especially if you remove extra binocular features. They could also be assisted by infrared streetlights if those wouldn’t mess up other animals. Downsides: I don’t think walking while wearing them would be fun, your depth perception and field of view takes a hit with most designs, and slow update of the screen can be disorienting. They’re also more complicated to make than flashlights.

That’s an interesting idea - instead of carrying a flashlight you might carry an RFID transponder. They’d need to not be linked to any personal records (such as purchase) to protect anonymity and prevent tracking. And a personal flashlight might still be useful.

I’m not sure I love the idea of lights flicking on, identifying where I am to someone waiting in the dark. Maybe it would turn on lights for a block length on the street or something? I’m also wondering if the reduced on-off cycling would wear out lights faster and, if so, how replacing them more often stacks up to more energy spent running them all the time.

Still it’s an interesting compromise position on the light pollution situation.

That is very cool!!

These are all awesome! You’ve given me a bunch to think about

I’ve seen the clipper ship Grain de Sail II, and I’ll definitely check these ones out too! I really like seeing some proof that modernized sail (with fairly traditional-looking rigging) is viable, and especially seeing which cargoes and routes make it viable. I think that might be a good look at what makes for worthwhile shipping in a solarpunk setting (high value goods, ingredients that only grow effectively in certain areas, humanitarian aid, etc). I think some takes on adding sails are perhaps too unwilling to compromise on the massive container ship design, grasping for how to keep that format running rather than examining if we should.

I wrote about this on the photobash I mentioned, but I genuinely like the optimization and logistical advantage of using standardized, stackable shipping containers which fit on ships, trucks, and trains without the need to load and unload the cargoes by hand at each transition in their journey. That’s great stuff, no complaints. What I wonder about is if that cost efficiency has caused other problems. We ship cargo all over the world but much of the time, we do it because it’s so cheap to do so. We ship raw material from one continent to process it on another, we ship that material again so we can shape it into parts, which are shipped back to the second continent for partial assembly, and then for final assembly on a fourth. Is that efficient? It’s cost efficient. But we burn terrible amounts of fuel each time we do it, and we do it for so many things. I’m not sure if there’s a green stand-in for that kind of dirt-cheap bulk shipping.

The Passat, the steel-hulled barque I borrowed parts from to make my last image (and its sibling ships) hauled nitrate, grain, concrete, and other stuff using a pretty traditional-looking hull (and loading it was apparently an important process which could and did lead to issues if done poorly. Like I said, most of the designs I’ve seen for container ships look a lot like regular ones with masts added on where they won’t get too in the way. I’d like to find or work out a design that starts with a viable sail ship and tweaks it towards modern features, like a way to somehow still load cargo in shipping containers, without messing up its form/function.

So thanks for the link (and for reading my rant)!

I like both of those ideas! I’ve seen a few cool takes on repurposed oil rigs, I’ll have to read up on them a bit to see what kind of resources they offer to long term residents, but I’d enjoy doing a take on it - maybe a ship charging station from windmills plus merchant hub/repairs like a bartering outpost from waterworld?

Nuclear powered ships are definitely proven and it’s be cool to see the tech put to a nonmilitary use - though the regulation/control aspect would be challenging to do safely.

Thanks!

The solar powered, electric drive ships are cool! I might include something like this homemade one in a scene sometime.

I’d never heard about the submarine efficiency, but it makes sense.

I’m thinking about types of ships etc, and I suppose a solarpunk setting might have less of a range of purposes in addition to less shipping overall? Like, fishing, lobstering, crab fishing, etc are the first industries that spring to mind for me but even if someone is opposed to solarpunk being vegan, I don’t think it’s controversial to say the populations of those species need time and space to recover. Plus a lot of ocean waste is from the fishing industry. (I know lots of cultures are basically built around fishing but I’m not exactly qualified to depict them anyways.)

But what does that leave? Cargo, transportation, research, ships involved in building offshore wind or tidal power?

I’m skeptical the flowers will have the ability to split concrete slabs/curbs apart - trees definitely could but flowers seem unlikely to me.

That’s awesome! I hope it works out! I’m just giving whatever laptops and tablets I can get to the group to give to individuals but it helps them with resumes, calling home, etc.