JacobCoffinWrites

Another winter (technically spring) solarpunk scene, this time centered around passive greenhouses. The idea is that since the sun will mostly be coming from one direction in colder climates, you surround the other sides with brick or concrete walls, which absorb heat during the day and radiate it at night (which is when you cover over the plastic). The first time I saw an article about this design I was amazed I’d never considered how poorly standard greenhouses fit our use case up here. I worked on a farm for years growing up and we heated about half of them at least through December. Single or double ply plastic sheets and corrugated white plastic siding nailed to stick frame walls on the ends. Garage doors only on either end. I can’t imagine how much they cost to heat. It’s that one-size-fits-all-just-burn-more-gas approach I think a solarpunk society should reconsider wherever it finds it.

In the photobash, I set these greenhouses into a south-facing hill, to further regulate their temperature. I also included a couple examples of passive heat – black painted water tanks and water barrels, to absorb sunlight and radiate warmth at night, along with bins of compost or manure, which put out both heat and CO2 as they decompose (making up for the lack of an oil furnace exhausting into the space to boost CO2). Some farms further boost the heat and CO2 by sheltering animals inside.

The top greenhouse would run cooler, and has cole crops (kohlrabi, cabbage, ad broccoli) and beans and potatoes in it. The lower house is hotter and has tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and peppers.

The lights are almost entirely for artistic reasons – my favorite winter scenes have the warm yellow light of human spaces contrasted with the almost monochrome blues of the winter outside. I wanted to do a solarpunk scene with that, and the greenhouses were a good fit. (Worst case, we’ll say they’re trying to extend the daylight hours a little). The design in this one likely isn’t perfect – I’ve only ever seen photos of the real thing, and the ones shown online vary but most are much larger than these modest greenhouses. I also didn’t get to include seedbeds, which would probably be the main priority this time of year. Presumably, they have deer fences erected further out.

A simple outline doodle of what I think is a whale, with feet like a bird. Black spray paint on stone block wall

Another from back when we were keeping an eye out for these tags. Here's one she sent me

Edit: the picture shows a concrete wall with a simple line drawing of an alien ghost with sad eyes floating to the left - two drops are drawn behind it

This one is nothing fancy, but it fit our workflow well. My SO has always saved recipes to a pinterest board - normally she brings a laptop to the kitchen and sets it up on a chair.

We finally took this tablet (came from corporate ewaste) and stuck it to the wall. It's too old for most apps but it seems to work well for this. We installed pinterest, and a podcast player. Eventually I'll check if there's a good replacement OS for the expired android version, but I figure we'll do a bit of a trial run, see how it's working for us and what we need, before starting with that.

The DamiLee video that's been making the rounds generated some interesting conversation around the rather muddled aesthetics of solarpunk. It suggested that the lack of a coherent single aesthetic is a weakness for the genre, and I wonder about that.

I'd agree it's a genre with fewer big visual examples to point to, and which is being pulled in many different directions.

At the same time, I wonder if it's possible or even worth doing. I think it might be hard to get a good universal aesthetic going, especially in architecture, as solarpunk buildings should be built to fit their environment - what's practical, energy efficient, and even what materials are locally available will depend on where the scene is set. Our current society, with its wealth of fuel and concrete, tends to drop the same cookie-cutter building into every climate and just burn more fuel to heat or cool it rather than adapt the design. As cyberpunk isn't aspirational, the societies it depicts can do the same. But solarpunk would have to look very different in the desert than in a temperate rainforest, or a prairie. Similarly, clothing would have to vary as widely as there's cultures and climates.

The only universal solarpunk aesthetics I can think of are the ones I'm trying to compete with with my own art (generally the impractical utopian megacities with touches of green). I'd wanted to pull people's first impressions of solarpunk away from thinking it was an empty eco-utopian aesthetic, easy to dismiss like art of moon colonies or flying cities. I wanted to see if and think "hey why aren't we doing this?" I try to cover locations, industries, and seasons we don't otherwise see to show the genre has answers for that stuff.

Maybe that's why I'm asking this - because if the lack of a cohesive aesthetic is a problem at this early stage, then I'm deliberately contributing to it.

Despite my own art goals, I'd actually love to have a visual shorthand to make my art more recognizably solarpunk. I sometimes reference some of the AI art people post to find bits and pieces of aesthetics that don't change the message but hopefully pull it closer to what people expect (the solarpunk kitchen's dark wood-paneled interior and red accent wall came from that kind of search).

Over on reddit, someone suggested that architecturally we could try to work out a specific style for each biome, and some elements of design that could be universal to tie them all together somehow.

So what do you think? Can it be done? And does this matter? Is a cohesive overall theme necessary to build the genre and reach people or just a way for marketers and Hollywood to repackage the genre, make it safe, and sell it back to us, the way they did with cyberpunk back in the 90s when they picked it too early? They defanged it by utterly absorbing it, using it to sell everything they could, making it this joke aesthetic with no deeper message. Cyberpunk won in the end, infecting science fiction with its themes and eventually aesthetics, until now it's kind of the primary voice in the genre. But they pretty much killed it for a solid decade at the least.

For a long while, I'd been picturing a society that handled reuse the way I do IRL - if you have a thing, you make it last as long as possible, fix it if you can, and when it's finally worn out you find another use for it (even if just as component parts). I'd imagined the transfer of usable items would be handled informally, through community networks or something similar to Everything is Free/Buy Nothing groups IRL.

But conversations awhile back got me imagining a bigger, community/societal-level focus on reuse. Perhaps a society where most people's first source for some household items or appliances or furniture would be some kind of community stockpile. I imagine warehouses where items are sorted and tested, fixed, and perhaps broken down to components for other repairs. Where they're catalogued and posted to some kind of library- or eBay-like website. I imagine community drop off and collection points, where someone who's downsizing might bring extra appliances, and young folks just starting out might pick their first furniture. I picture a separate refuse stream for things that are still good or could be fixed, emphasizing that there's a difference between something you don't need anymore, and something nobody needs (actual garbage). I could even see work crews combing through long-abandoned houses, hauling out items to put back into circulation, before disassembling the building, Habitat For Humanity -style, to use the lumber and counters and cabinets etc elsewhere.

I don't think this would be the only source of stuff, probably not even the primary one. If you want fancy furniture I figure you'd go to a local workshop and see what they've got, or commission something from an open-source design. But I could see this system of reuse taking the place of something like Walmart or IKEA. Sort of your default for cheap stuff (I'm weak on economic theory; I'd love a society where it's all free, but I don't know enough to describe that with confidence. Hopefully it'd at least be a government org, or a worker run nonprofit type thing where all profits go to the workers and continuing operation?). I like the idea of a society with an institutional focus on reuse rather than extraction and disposal.

Normally I don't start off with a whole chunk of world building like that, but I'm planning some photobash scenes around these ideas, and I'd love to work out some of the questions and discussions about logistics before I've made the things and done something wrong.

The first question I had was around collection of these items. I'd been imagining some kind of vehicle operating a bit like a garbage truck, making rounds through various neighborhoods collecting the things people don't want, but less frequently and with a slower pace because they have to be more careful with the stuff they pick up and have to make more trips back to the depot. I'd love to do a streetcar or something other than a generic box truck, but I think a truck makes the most sense. Streetcars were occasionally used to deliver the mail, but I've found no examples of them even being used as garbage trucks, which might be able to maintain a pace that wouldn't disrupt everything else on the line. Depending on the level of service offered, they could need a lot of flexibility - do they pick up just from community drop off points, or from the curb outside people's homes, or do they assist with moving things out of homes for those who are elderly or disabled? Maybe different levels of service for different circumstances?

I hope people would do their best to re-home items directly using the future equivalent of EIF or Buy Nothing, but it'd be nice if there was an option besides the landfill for items that don't generate interest in their immediate community, or where the person just wants it gone with the convenience of throwing it out. I feel like this could help with that.

Then there's the question of how do you get bulky items home in a society where almost no one drives? IKEA and Walmart design a lot of their products to fit, flat-packed, into your sedan or hatchback. And they offer delivery. This society would be handling a lot of already built items and have a lower reliance on personal cars. Maybe most street cars would let you lug a dresser onboard if they're not crowded? I've certainly done similar with the local trains, though the guy at the turnstile wasn't paying attention and probably would have stopped us. Maybe you'd use a cargo bike and trailer? Maybe you just have to hire a delivery service for big things? Is it abelist if the small storefront-style drop-off/pickup sites first answer is to hand you a push cart with your bulky item and send you down the street with it?

Do you have any thoughts on the idea of reuse at this scale?

Made in response to this post – on the realization that there aren’t many examples of solarpunk art set in winter.

One thing I've been considering is if snow rollers, or a modern take on packing down snow instead of plowing it out of the way, might make a comeback in a society with fewer cars and snowy winters. Around here, they used to use sleighs in the winter, and snow rollers pulled by oxen to flatten the roads for travel. The idea of shoveling an entire road bare so you could drive on it would probably have seemed pretty extravagant to them.

It’s an idea that’s been rattling around in my head for awhile. There’s a sizable contingent in solarpunk spaces who are very much in favor of society deprioritizing cars and focusing on trains and other public transit options. If our solarpunk society has resource limitations, as most societies do, and they're prioritizing big infrastructure stuff like trains, ropeways, etc, it's possible that roads would fall apart pretty quick.

Around here at least, roads, bridges, etc require constant maintenance to remain anywhere approaching drivable. Winter breaks them with frost heaves and potholes, spring turns their footings to muddy slop or washes them away in floods. The maintenance is constant and expensive.

I feel like a society where most people take the train, and ride bikes, would find themselves wondering why they need to maintain a lot of these roads to a drivable level. Especially if this solarpunk community is rebuilding after our current society goes through a span of societal crumbles and leaves them with even more infrastructure debt. I tend to set these pictures in that period of post-post-apoclyptic rebuilding, after places like my hometown have already condensed back towards smaller, denser villages, rather than the sprawling pseudo-suburbia we have now. (Out of necessary due to societal crumbles and cars/gas becoming less reliable.) Towns here used to have multiple small clumps of houses and industry built around walking, with big spans of farms and forest between them where you'd catch a wagon or car ride to a town with a train station.

So in this setting, I imagine trains and ropeways link these small, dense villages. Primary roads to other towns are maintained, along with ones leading to nearby farms, but there are probably a lot of abandoned developments an impractical distance out, linked by roads that have been mostly left to break up and wash out just because the society doesn’t have the means or a strong reason to maintain them. Perhaps they’re letting some areas rewild, maybe they only make jaunts out on these old roads to disassemble houses for all their useful parts, and to return the lots to nature.

I imagine that sometimes, the ropeways don’t follow the main roads. Perhaps they take more direct routs, or cross spans where bridges have collapsed and haven’t been replaced. Most of the time they’d follow some kind of road, just because that makes it easier for the work crews who build and maintain them, but perhaps these roads aren’t active enough to justify plowing all winter. Seasonality is a good concept for solarpunk societies, I feel like a solarpunk society would consider seasonal means of travel.

I imagine a lot of these secondary roads are used as winter trails, packed down with snow groomers and traveled by people on cross country skis, snowshoes, sleighs, perhaps electric snowmobiles or those bicycle/sled contraptions.

That’s where I set this one. A seasonal road used as a winter trail, followed for some of its course by a ropeway. On either end of that cable, the villages are lit and warm, their streets plowed, but out here, its just the quiet static hiss of snow falling, the creak of the pulleys overhead, and the rumbling of the groomer crew making a pass to pack the trail.

This image and all the postcards are CC-BY, use them how you like.

A quick one based on u/Sam-Nales's comment about combining airship mooring masts with screw conveyors/screw elevators similar to those used by grain silos on my last post over on reddit. I talked it over with the folks on the farming community: https://slrpnk.net/post/3643695 and feel like there's a definite place for grain and silos in a solarpunk world. This was a quick one, the zoomed out scenes often are.

I'm not sure a mooring mast is entirely necessary here, with the big, recently-reaped fields to land on, but perhaps this farm is using a system compatible to other farms nearby who use more agroforestry, and wouldn't necessarily like having to clear a patch of empty land just for landing airships

I'm mostly asking because I posted a photobash of an airship yard I did to the solarpunk subreddit and someone brought up combining airship mooring masts and screw conveyors like grain silos use (though we might be closer to concrete-industry-scale once you lift stuff to mooring-mast-height). A combined mooring mast and silo might be practical in a place with a lot of flavors of agroforestry, where they might not want to clear a patch of empty land just for landing airships.

It got me thinking about grain silos and how they'd fit. I know folks on this instance generally don't like industrial scale farming and monocrops, which is what I generally associate with grain, but I know so little about it. So I guess my questions are pretty broad and open to correction - could the mooring mast/silo idea work in a society with a lot of airborne shipping, what's a solarpunk way to grow those crops? Anything you'd like to see in art of farming? (I'm still working on the scene of the village, which includes all the suggestions from last time)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3618799

Another glance at the more industrial parts of this solarpunk future. This one was inspired by the absolutely massive mountain of clothes which has been dumped, brand new and unsold, in the Atacama desert in Chile. The product of our society’s fast fashion industry and the complexities of our supply chains, a tremendous amount of energy and water is wasted producing these clothes, more energy is wasted shipping them, and then yet more is spent to haul them into the desert where they smother the landscape and ecosystem in cheap synthetic materials.

One of my overarching goals with this series is to show a society institutionally focused on reuse, rather than extraction and production. A society that thinks further ahead than we do, which produces what it needs, and thinks carefully about how to use and reuse and repurpose what it makes. A society where the wealth of usable product we currently throw away is treated like a natural resource to be found and traded between peoples engaged in the thousand year cleanup. I hope that in this future, the fast fashion industry is long dead, and that whatever demand for its products remains can be met using the absurd backlog of clothes produced unnecessarily and heaped in the driest desert in the world.

Which brings me to my other goal for this photobash. I’ve been wanting to do a scene with airships ever since the discussion we had here. In fact, I’ll probably do a few. Despite seeing relatively little use, airship design has advanced tremendously in the last hundred years. Improved materials have allowed them to take more effective shapes, and improved engines, motors, batteries, and computer systems, have made them much easier to control. While reading about historical airships, I was struck by the risk in doing almost anything with them, but especially by landing – which often required ground crews (‘landing parties’) of hundreds of men who would by strength of muscle, pull the thing down to the ground. By contrast, modern airships can land themselves right on the ground.

They also have pretty good potential as a sort of closed-loop system: If you covered the top of an airship with solar panels, you would have significant generation capacity, especially above the clouds (solar panels work better in the cold). You could use this to drive electric motors, and excess power could be used to generate hydrogen for both lift and fuel. This just needs water, which also makes an excellent ballast.

Helium is another option, but it’s a limited resource which, as I understand it, requires drilling to obtain.

Airships could open up some really cool possibilities: while they lack the speed of a jet, they have more capacity, and lower fuel requirements. While they lack the sheer capacity of a container ship, they're a lot faster and use way less fuel. They can also fly over land, meaning they can reach all kinds of places ships can't, and cut long detours around continents. Basically, container ships might be able to carry more, but they’re not as good at going from Boston to Seattle, and they suck at getting to Kansas City. What’s more, airships can act as flying cranes, lifting bulky objects like wind turbines or assembled buildings right over obstacles, and to places where roads or trains simply couldn’t carry them.

For the layout of this airshipyard, I decided that though modern airships can just land on the ground, the process of clearing and building a landing pad is environmentally destructive enough that this society would probably want to prioritize lower-impact mooring masts for waiting airships, and build just enough pads to match their loading capacity. This definitely wasn’t just because mooring masts, with the airships weathervaning around their tops in the wind, are tremendously cool. Or because the ugly metal towers reinforce some themes I've been playing with, trying to show that even in an aspirational solarpunk future, there are going to be places that don't look aesthetic but where utilitarian, practical designs make the most sense, and can have a beauty of their own.

I also included a massive airship shed, as I thought that even a smaller shipyard like this might need a maintenance capability and shelter for damaged airships grounded in bad weather. I’m not sure how well they could service the variety of craft currently moored, but hopefully with modern technology they can make it work. I imagine that the main airship yards would be located at major cities, and that these airships have already dropped off cargoes from their own points of origin, and are here to collect old world clothing and materials made from clothing.

The airships themselves are mostly pulled from modern designs and prototypes, with solar panels added to their tops. I’m particularly fond of ones like the Flying Whale on the top right, which can apparently work like a flying crane and winch cargo directly into the hold without landing.

Once this cleanup is complete, the mooring towers and buildings can be partially disassembled, and carried to the next place using the airships themselves. Hopefully all that will be left behind is the footings of the towers and a concrete slab in the desert with a plaque which reads something like ‘On this spot old world corporations made an ungodly mess. And generations of people worked hard to clean it up.’

This image, and the rest of the postcards are all CC-BY, use them how you want. Also: big thanks to @loopgru @Five, and @cynar@lemmy.world for telling me enough about airships to get started on this one!

Another glance at the more industrial parts of this solarpunk future. This one was inspired by the absolutely massive mountain of clothes which has been dumped, brand new and unsold, in the Atacama desert in Chile. The product of our society’s fast fashion industry and the complexities of our supply chains, a tremendous amount of energy and water is wasted producing these clothes, more energy is wasted shipping them, and then yet more is spent to haul them into the desert where they smother the landscape and ecosystem in cheap synthetic materials.

One of my overarching goals with this series is to show a society institutionally focused on reuse, rather than extraction and production. A society that thinks further ahead than we do, which produces what it needs, and thinks carefully about how to use and reuse and repurpose what it makes. A society where the wealth of usable product we currently throw away is treated like a natural resource to be found and traded between peoples engaged in the thousand year cleanup. I hope that in this future, the fast fashion industry is long dead, and that whatever demand for its products remains can be met using the absurd backlog of clothes produced unnecessarily and heaped in the driest desert in the world.

Which brings me to my other goal for this photobash. I’ve been wanting to do a scene with airships ever since the discussion we had here. In fact, I’ll probably do a few. Despite seeing relatively little use, airship design has advanced tremendously in the last hundred years. Improved materials have allowed them to take more effective shapes, and improved engines, motors, batteries, and computer systems, have made them much easier to control. While reading about historical airships, I was struck by the risk in doing almost anything with them, but especially by landing – which often required ground crews (‘landing parties’) of hundreds of men who would by strength of muscle, pull the thing down to the ground. By contrast, modern airships can land themselves right on the ground.

They also have pretty good potential as a sort of closed-loop system: If you covered the top of an airship with solar panels, you would have significant generation capacity, especially above the clouds (solar panels work better in the cold). You could use this to drive electric motors, and excess power could be used to generate hydrogen for both lift and fuel. This just needs water, which also makes an excellent ballast.

Helium is another option, but it’s a limited resource which, as I understand it, requires drilling to obtain.

Airships could open up some really cool possibilities: while they lack the speed of a jet, they have more capacity, and lower fuel requirements. While they lack the sheer capacity of a container ship, they're a lot faster and use way less fuel. They can also fly over land, meaning they can reach all kinds of places ships can't, and cut long detours around continents. Basically, container ships might be able to carry more, but they’re not as good at going from Boston to Seattle, and they suck at getting to Kansas City. What’s more, airships can act as flying cranes, lifting bulky objects like wind turbines or assembled buildings right over obstacles, and to places where roads or trains simply couldn’t carry them.

For the layout of this airshipyard, I decided that though modern airships can just land on the ground, the process of clearing and building a landing pad is environmentally destructive enough that this society would probably want to prioritize lower-impact mooring masts for waiting airships, and build just enough pads to match their loading capacity. This definitely wasn’t just because mooring masts, with the airships weathervaning around their tops in the wind, are tremendously cool. Or because the ugly metal towers reinforce some themes I've been playing with, trying to show that even in an aspirational solarpunk future, there are going to be places that don't look aesthetic but where utilitarian, practical designs make the most sense, and can have a beauty of their own.

I also included a massive airship shed, as I thought that even a smaller shipyard like this might need a maintenance capability and shelter for damaged airships grounded in bad weather. I’m not sure how well they could service the variety of craft currently moored, but hopefully with modern technology they can make it work. I imagine that the main airship yards would be located at major cities, and that these airships have already dropped off cargoes from their own points of origin, and are here to collect old world clothing and materials made from clothing.

The airships themselves are mostly pulled from modern designs and prototypes, with solar panels added to their tops. I’m particularly fond of ones like the Flying Whale on the top right, which can apparently work like a flying crane and winch cargo directly into the hold without landing.

Once this cleanup is complete, the mooring towers and buildings can be partially disassembled, and carried to the next place using the airships themselves. Hopefully all that will be left behind is the footings of the towers and a concrete slab in the desert with a plaque which reads something like ‘On this spot old world corporations made an ungodly mess. And generations of people worked hard to clean it up.’

This image, and the rest of the postcards are all CC-BY, use them how you want. Also: big thanks to @loopgru @Five, and @cynar@lemmy.world for telling me enough about airships to get started on this one!