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Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

One thought that keeps popping into my head every time I see something solarpunk related - Solarpunk is proto Star Trek.

It's the closest concept we have to that post scarcity utopia, albeit on a very small scale, and likely completely unsustainable for any decently sized chunk of the global population. But it makes me wonder what the best way to chart that progress would be, and what the present day equivalent for quality of life it would be best to aim at based on current levels of technology.

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Sustainability for large populations is kind've a cornerstone of solarpunk, alongside decentralization and horizontal power to empower individuals and communities against corporation and government control.

There's a lot of discussion on how to implement solarpunk in the here and now over on the fediverse, like Lemmy, but a condensed version of short term goals tends to be:

1. Switch to solar and wind on a mass scale, including personal solar such as the type described in low-tech magazine, combined with reducing energy use as much as is reasonable.

2. Embrace permaculture urbanism, where energy and food production take place in cities. The most well researched proposal put forward is by the Edenicity project.

3. Replace as many cars as possible by implementing more robust and far reaching public transport and bicycle infrastructure in urban and rural areas, more in line with the Netherlands.

4. Build new societal structures that are bottom up through mutual aid, to wean ourselves off corporatism and consumerism, and to develop community independence.

None of those objectives are too far fetched, and would lay the groundwork for even more positive change.

I would also add that all of these would provide jobs, construction, high-level engineering, etc and any knock on benefit people with paying work contribute to their local/national economies would bring.

I agree. But it has a similar aspirational quality, to me, as well thought out proposals for eg Moon colonization.

I suppose the question left is overcoming the blocking path dependence - the method of mass action to get there.

Moon colonization requires billions or even trillions of capital all at once, and can only be done by elite experts in a very specialized field, with no practical gain to society toward solving or global warming. It would be an expense almost impossible to justify, and only corporations building the parts would truly benefit.

Solarpunk, on the other hand, is accessible for an incredibly wide swath of people to contribute toward achieving, as a solarpunk life would actually save money while improving quality of life and mitigating global warming.

Solar panels are within the financial reach of most parts of society, bicycles are far more affordable than cars, better zoning laws are only a stroke of a pen, gardening your food or creating a larger communal gardening area creates food resiliency while saving money, and again is within reach of almost all economic situations.

It can be a big government program, but it scales down incredibly well compared to colonizing the moon, and I believe that is key to it being viable.

It seems like Trek handwaved away or ignored a lot of the issues that weren't directly solved by replicators. Joseph Sisko had a restaurant on earth. The idea of a guy who loves to cook for people having a place where anyone can walk in off the street, order from a menu, and eat for free is easy to envision. The problem comes when you start to think about how there's a very finite amount of physical space. Questions like who decided that he should have that property for his restaurant vs anyone else who wanted to do something with it just never come up.

I'm interested in seeing Solarpunk grow so that we can see different people's ideas on how issues like this can be addressed without these fictional worlds becoming dystopian.

That part that bothered me is that everyone in the Federation appears to have more or less the same worldview. That struck me as sort of a cop out versus depicting the characters having to navigate different worldviews/religions/ideologies making up the Federation.

Most of that kind of conflict was usually framed in terms of human vs alien. Sometimes it was still within the federation (Worf trying to get someone to kill him when he was injured and likely wouldn't fully recover for example), but a lot of it was dealing with outsiders like humans having to deal with Ferengi who had very different ideology when it came to things like greed or women's rights.

For outsiders, while the show was pretty careful about expressing a respect for differing cultural views, they did seem to side one way or the other. When there was disagreement within the federation it tended to be a single person or small fraction with an unpopular opinion (like the guy who wanted to disassemble and reverse-engineer Data) creating conflict vs a sizable faction.

I sort of thought that was the whole point of the show: the humans live in a liberal utopia according to western progressives and the aliens are everyone else in the world they have to get along with.

It let the writers comment on contemporary issues with adjustable knobs for violence, sex, and laser beams, in hopes that the right cocktail could dislodge people from from their instinctive association with a political identity and let them learn something.

It seems to me the assumption of consensus with disagreement coming from small fringe factions mirrored much of the American experience during the TNG era.

To me, it seemed pretty clear that in the Federation context a restaurant or a bar is a cultural space and its value would be beyond its ability to produce meals for hungry people

> The problem comes when you start to think about how there's a very finite amount of physical space.

It's not finite in a practical sense, especially if you are a space faring civilization. Certain space is treasured and in demand, but space usage overall comes down to how well you can utilize it (how tall your buildings can be), and how you access it. And in Star Trek, they have transporter, allowing people to live everywhere and still visiting most places casually for breakfast.

Even today, humankind on earth is not going out of space. Instead, we have problems with finding places which are easier to utilize for the majority, or which are popular for cultural reasons. But the first one is no problem in Star Trek, and the second one seems to have reached a peaceful solution.

> Questions like who decided that he should have that property for his restaurant vs anyone else who wanted to do something with it just never come up.

Who decides today that someone should have a certain space? And I'm not talking about money, welfare-projects exists today too. Every society has their organization, why should this different just because they have no money by our understanding?

And why do you think it's a privilege for Sisko to open a restaurant that others have not? I would think everyone can open a restaurant if they wish, but they simply do not wish to do this if they have no monetary stress doing it. At the end, a restaurant is hard work, not everyone is willing to put up with this.

Yeah. Star Trek is very "Look at this cool society" without "This is how we got there"

I dont know if it is still canon, but the vulcans supposedly simply "fixed" earths economy and transitioned humans away from money. Its very surface level. They never go into depth about how that was done or what the downsides were.

Even in say, Arthur C Clarke's childhoods end, there were details about the how and why people resisted the overlords.

Some episodes explored steps along the journey. Eg. DS9's Past Tense where they're taken back in time to a Sanctuary District confronts poverty and homelessness.

Once a replicator is invented, human economic systems don’t make any sense. In a society without scarcity, money is meaningless as anyone can have whatever he/she desires nearly instantly. Of course, there are great discussions around what this would do to people psychologically and thus what such a breakthrough would do to human civilization.

A replicator still cannot give everyone a beachfront villa.

But a holodeck could

Okay so you get the holodeck villa, and I get the real beach villa (which also has a holodeck inside). Deal?

Ehm, everyone gets a holodeck, a replicator, and an abundance of energy to run them? Deal, take your beach villa, idc.

you could replicate another planet with just as many or more beachfronts

I wonder if the replicators were made in real life if they' hallucinate generations like Stable Diffusion

Replicators as depicted in Star Trek cannot exist in the real world because they violate the laws of physics.

Do they though? I thought the way they worked was by composing requested items from raw materials kept somewhere in the ship using energy provided by the warp core. If I recall there’s mention of devices that go the other direction, decomposing waste to help replenish raw matter reserves. It’s a bit handwavy but doesn’t seem like it violates the laws of conservation at least.

They violate physics by the use of transporters. This is how replicators really store the enormous amounts of resources - otherwise the ships would be full of material storage.

Imagine condensing the food that people need into a compact goo that can later be restructured into real food. That's not so much volume, especially for a large ship with ample recreational rooms and carpeted flooring.

Plus, keep in mind that poop is likely turned back into food. If you have tech to reassemble molecules from one thing to another, this is trivial.

It's still going to take less energy and fewer resources to just grow the food normally and store it, and even just eat the goo directly than to reconstitute it atom by atom into anything else. Star Trek technology is only efficient because the writers don't care about things like thermodynamics or E=MC^2. In the real world a replicator would need to consume ocean-boiling levels of energy to assemble a cup of early grey tea, and because we don't have "Heisenberg compensators" in our reality, it would definitely be at least a little radioactive, and not entirely tea.

I don't think they convert energy into matter directly as you suggest; they have substance A which they convert into energy and then convert than into substance B. They're not using energy as input and they're maintaining the total amount of energy/matter. At least that's the impression given in the early show; I'm sure they went of the rails at some point.

In any case, if we want to discuss a realistic implementation of this (which is probably at least a century away), we'd likely use some form of nanotechnology to recompose waste into food. But again, without "creating" matter, simply rearranging it.

>we'd likely use some form of nanotechnology to recompose waste into food. But again, without "creating" matter, simply rearranging it.

Nanotech isn't magic. The process would still require energy and would create more waste than can be possibly recovered, and diminishing returns would be inevitable. There's no perfect system possible here, entropy can't be cheated.

> completely unsustainable for any decently sized chunk of the global population

I think the inherent critique in Solarpunk is that our current way of doing things is unsustainable for any decently-sized chunk of the global population - that climate change and general environmental collapse are signs that capitalism as we’ve run it so far cannot continue. If you take the critique at face value, it becomes less of a trade-off, because we don’t really have the thing we think we’re trading against: we’re not trading a successful capitalist future for a gamble on sustainability, we’re trying to find a successful future to begin with.

The heart is in the right place, but the means to achieve it are incorrect and incomplete.

We should at least try to experiment with various social, ecological and economical approaches, as we're currently being held stuck.

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