From Steampunk to Solarpunk (2008)

Was this when the term was coined?

I’ve always thought it a little interesting—some older video games, the game Creatures, maybe some of the Final Fantasy games, possibly Myst(? I didn’t actually play it), seem to have a sort of pseudo solarpunk aesthetic. Mostly I think because they wanted to have puzzles and doodads that were sort of interactive, but also free-standing, and also they wanted to have “old stuff” littered about, so it needs to be renewably powered, to avoid hard to answer questions about who’s going around these ancient ruins fueling all this stuff up.

Or possibly solarpunk just drew inspiration from this stuff, I don’t know.

Anyway, it is a cool vibe.

My issue with Solarpunk, given that it puts quite a bit of emphasis on wanting to inspire real world change is just how pastoral it always seems. When you see works inspired by it, it's always a nice walkable neighborhood with a bunch of cool eco friendly gadgetry[1] and so on.

It always seems very escapist to me, like a sort of techno Hobbingen view of the future. Is there a work in the Solarpunk genre that throws a Solarpunk society in a military confrontation? Especially today competitive and defense concerns again seem to drive energy and technological development.

[1] https://i0.wp.com/solarpunkmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

The technology is very cool- it's a shame to see this is from 2008 and for whatever reason, it hasn't caught on in the last 15 years.

On another note, I find the idea of solarpunk really appealing, but don't come accross many specific recommendations (even this article only mentions one book)- anyone here have any good shouts on where to start?

Why not both?

If there is collapse and we don't have all our existing manufacturing, I could see concentrated solar power into steam being a primary energy source. You can also store steam and then use it for all sorts of purposes including manufacturing and even cooling (yes!)

Solar punk could just be the actually viable steam punk. I got one look forward to the awesome hats and goggles

https://github.com/civboot/civboot/blob/main/blog/0011-conce...

I was prompted to post this after gleefully glimpsing a solar punk world at the beginning of the film Furiosa for a few minutes.

Awkward to state the reason without giving a spoiler, albeit for the immediate the very start of the film.

As good as the film is, I was itching to see me of this world.

I first heard of Solarpunk from the Imaginary Worlds podcast:

https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/solarpunk-th...

Which prompted me to post the Wikipedia link 4 years ago, several others posted similar links prior to that, and others have posted interesting links here too:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=false&qu...

Fiction is nice, but from a technology angle key technology would be

- solar

- wind

- perhaps geothermal (microwave beam borehole drilling down 7km)

- battery

- microgrid (district scale)

- grid forming technology (or maybe using DC power instead of AC..?)

- systems that can be switched on to using surplus power, and off at peak demand

- of course the whole underlying social structure. Markets can help in self organising, until they start to become the system…

Handy podcast is Redefining Energy, although this has never mentioned Solarpunk, but has lots of the technology, and new ways of implementing much of it:

https://redefining-energy.com/

(Fixed ghastly typos once I read over this post)

So, we just launched a website for a project which we're calling Solarpunk school – a learning center we want to build at our farm, where we've been doing a bunch of conservation work. Hope y'all don't mind me sharing the link:

https://www.cleryfarm.org

We're really into Solarpunk as a movement, and wanted to grow the impact of the conservation work and build on that with community projects. The idea is that the school would facilitate things like community gardens, lecture events, music & art camps, outdoor education programs – all aiming to inspire and motivate people towards building a solarpunk future, where regenerative agriculture combined with technology plays a central role.

Also recommend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVlBmdvIC6s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqQJHja9qxU

The Beluga Skysail ship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Onego_Deusto