Hello World, I'm Tomasino.
This is SolarPunk Prompts,
a series to inspire storytellers,
where we discuss solar punk,
a movement that imagines a world where technology is used
for the good of the planet.
In this series,
we spend each episode exploring a single solar punk story
prompt, adding some commentary, some inspirations,
and some considerations.
Most importantly,
we consider how that story might help us to better envision
a sustainable civilization.
If this is your first time here,
I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first,
or the season's introduction,
where we talk about what solar punk is,
why you should and why this series came into being.
Today's prompt is the Moonshot.
A group of scientists, environmentalists, and politicians,
such as lobbyists to the UN,
are analyzing the footprints of the solar panels and
windmills around the world, trying to answer the question,
is sending a rocket to the moon and back to get a ton of
moon soil?
The best thing we can do in the middle of a climate crisis?
Is moon helium fusion the best way forward?
Today,
only about 17% of our world's energy production supply
comes from low carbon energy,
and only about 12% from renewables.
We hope that our future situation will continue to change,
and our communities will find new and varied ways of moving
toward distributed power generation, local power,
and smaller sustainability.
We also need to acknowledge that our capacity for the
future is growing.
for large -scale energy generation is taking a step
backward.
It is the idea and ideal of solar punk to envision the
world where local environmental balance and sustainable
practices mean our need for this large power network is
diminished.
And what we see in homegrown communities living this model
today, those expectations are fairly realistic.
But what happens when we need to do more?
What happens when our communities need to act big or act
together on a macro scale?
In this prompt,
we ponder the need to do something monumental,
traveling to the moon.
Even today,
this is a massive undertaking that simply not feasible for
many nations around the globe.
We have highly technical societies with massive power grids
and industries capable of so much.
Yet the resources required for such a thing still pose
problems.
It may be a lack of physical resources, the fuel creation,
or the material sciences needed for a heat shield.
Or the challenges may be political,
with dominant forces asking why their efforts should go to
such a wild idea,
even in wealthy societies with true abundance there can be
a disconnect between the mission and the benefit in the
eyes of the people.
And to be fair,
the connections aren't always immediately obvious.
Take for example some recent research from the European
Space Agency, frying potatoes in space.
Scientists looked at the complex physics and chemistry
involved in frying,
testing the process at increased gravitational forces in a
centrifuge, and at low gravity in a parabolic flight test.
They learned that the optimal gravity for french fries is
3G.
They also learned that even in low gravity the movement of
bubbles still supports a workable frying method.
But why?
Why the research?
Why?
The expense of flight tests, over and over.
The immediate output is confirmation that astronauts who
hope to travel to Mars won't be stuck with rehydrated food
alone, they'll have some other options like boiling.
But more importantly,
these chemical and physical processes open the door to our
understanding of more complex subjects,
like producing hydrogen from solar energy in microgravity.
The silly french fry experiment might help us to create the
fuel needed for missions deeper into our solar system.
And it's not always clear why.
And that's an important theme to consider in your stories.
The human will to do a thing is the first and greatest
commodity needed.
One story you might look at for inspiration is Antirdena
Hudson's our shared storm.
The setting here is mostly centered around political
saloons and conferences,
but that doesn't mean the stakes are low.
There is plenty of drama as the stories play out across
five overlapping scenarios of a natural disaster,
striking Buenos Aires during a climate conference.
How do these scenarios play out scientifically,
but also politically,
with faction stemming from different regions?
Politics probably represents the most difficult aspect of a
scenario requiring this macroactivity.
If that's not your strong area,
or if you want to focus on something a bit smaller,
we could aim this moonshot project a bit lower.
Instead of the moon,
what about something that requires a few communities,
but not several nations to accomplish?
One notion might be a don't have meltdowns and burn out
much of the radioactive waste found in older uranium
reactors.
It's a stepping stone toward cleaner energy, doable today,
and could help generations to come.
From a philosophical view,
it seemed aimed in the right direction,
though there are valid criticisms to explore if you go down
that path.
Thorium -based reactors are also an option,
offering increased safety, less waste,
less radioactivity in the waste.
In either case,
the effort required to build such a thing is still more
than a small community can hope to achieve.
Thousands of skilled workers would need to team together,
and the raw materials for the facility and the fuel are
just not common.
How does such a thing come to be in your imagined future?
What are the many barriers?
What are the struggles?
A moonshot project is essentially a challenge to
SolarPunk's happy -go -lucky fetishization of windmills and
solar panels.
The aesthetic is confronted with a cold,
hard reality that there are things for which it may not be
well equipped.
What happens when we face these challenges head -on?
Who will want to buckle to the pressure and seek the easy
way out?
What sort of engineering insights and hard science might
you pull into the story to make the struggle
understandable?
If our goal is to create a vision for a possible future,
one where we have found some equilibrium with our
environment,
then we can use this sort of vehicle to demonstrate ongoing
challenges.
There is a common stumbling block for riders approaching
SolarPunk for the first time.
The utopian vision of these communities,
the struggle to fix everything is in the past,
and now it's all gardens and windmills.
And that suggests that conflict is already resolved.
For a rider who might be attracted the topic of climate
fiction,
writing something without that conflict sounds frankly
boring.
A prompt like this one may be a boon to such a writer.
Here we see communities who have come a long way and still
face new and ongoing challenges.
What if the distributed microgrids,
localized manufacturing and so on, are helping,
but are not enough?
What if we need to do a mega -project?
What if it's proven that it's not just a scam,
but every scientist can support its value?
Do we want to surrender the locality of our communities to
recreate hierarchy and create something truly big,
something that may be controlled by just a few people?
Can we allow that culturally?
If not, can we suffer the cost of inaction?
How can you raise the stakes even further?
These are big questions that go Beyond the technical,
though they may be grounded in it,
they go beyond the political,
though that may be where the conflict is expressed.
They're ethical questions,
they're essential questions of identity,
and that's anything but boring.
Finally, I encourage you to play with the norms.
In a world where Solar Punk has reached its first stage and
is struggling with its next step,
what has changed in the everyday mores that might help it
or might make it more difficult?
These everyday sensibilities will humanize and ground the
bigger action, making it more accessible to the reader.
These small things also tend to represent the values of the
people more effectively than the big thing.
How will your community safeguard their values as they face
these decisions?
Do they formalize protections by creating organizations?
Do they internalize new ideas of taboo?
A good resource on these ideas would be the Tetralogy Terra
Ignota by Ada Palmer.
In this series,
we see a playful treatment of the philosophy of cultural
morals, which manages to frame the future for us,
injects a position to our past.
We cannot help but see our own world through the eyes of
someone from the 18th century and thus better understand
the foreignness of the future.
And that may be an important element for us to consider as
readers.
The pathway to this better future is not just external,
it's not just the infrastructure or the politics.
It's also a part of our values and our cultural norms.
How will those change for us to get where we're going?
And how will those change once we get there?
Until next time,
I'm Tomasino and I hope you'll join me for the next series.
episode of Solar Pup Rhymes.
Music in this episode was from the tracks Last and First
Light and Artemis by Scott Buckley.
Music by Scott Buckley.