this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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Solarpunk Travel

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Community for those focused on sustainable travel. Our society's current levels of energy intensive and frequent travel are not compatible with life on a finite planet. We advocate for long-term slow travel to see the world, and low energy local travel to deeply experience your community. Green washing free zone.

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The communities listed above are decentralized. Centralized instances are omitted as they go against the fedi purpose and it’s better to cultivate digital rights in the free world. That means instances that have a disproportionately large population or are centralized on Cloudflare are not listed.

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[–] curiousaur@reddthat.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The dream seems to be solar panels across the top and onboard electrolysis, and fuel cells. Then the same hydrogen that keeps you afloat is also your energy storage. A compressor to store extra hydrogen also seems like a good idea. I imagine we can make these into closed systems.

The onboard electrolysis isn't as useful as you'd think - electrolysis is energy-intensive, you need water, acquiring water is energy a intensive, and water is heavy. Like, 8/9 of the weight of water is oxygen.

With current tech it doesn't make sense, but in a more sci-fi sense I think it does - the sky is full of dense patches of gaseous water, commonly known as "clouds", and if going through a cloud wasn't incredibly dangerous for airships then they could just do that, catch handfuls of cloud, then condense it and electrolyze it. That way the airship doesn't need to lift huge amounts of oxygen from lakes then dump it.

And if we're speaking sci-fi, making airships stormproof is basically mandatory, they can't outrun storms and due to their long flight-times (due to low speed), they're more likely to encounter them mid-flight.