Link tags: solar

Kardashev Street

Matt has made a new website for tracking our collective progress levelling up the Kardashev scale:

Maximising energy generation, distribution and usage at street level, for as many people as possible, everyday.

Donuts and Dyson Spheres – Petafloptimism

I really, really like this post from Matt (except for the bit where he breaks Simon’s rule).

Erik Wernquist - Short Film: “One Revolution Per Minute”

Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:

I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.

Down to Earth

Solarpunk and synthetic biology as a two-pronged approach to the future:

Neither synbio nor Solarpunk has all the right answers, but when they are joined in a symbiotic relationship, they become greater than the sum of their parts. If people could express what they needed, and if scientists could champion those desires — then Solarpunk becomes a will and synbio becomes a way.

Days Since Incident

I love this list of ever-increasing timelines. All that’s missing is the time since the Carrington Event, just to remind us what could happen when the next one hits.

Open Lecture at CIID: “Keeping up with the Kardashevians” – Petafloptimism

A terrfic presentation from Matt Jones (with the best talk title ever). Pace layers, seamful design, solarpunk, and more.

the Intersection (2021) - YouTube

A great little sci-fi short film from Superflux—a mockumentary from the near future. It starts dystopian but then gets more solarpunk.

Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors | Fix

Twelve short stories of solarpunk cli-fi “envisioning the next 180 years of equitable climate progress.”

Whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, these stories provide flickers of hope, even joy, and serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.

Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It’s About the End of Capitalism

Hannah Steinkopf-Frank:

At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines a radically different societal and economic structure.

Solar Protocol

This website is hosted across a network of solar powered servers and is sent to you from wherever there is the most sunshine.

Interplanetary Lobbing

League tables for the game of probe-throwing currently underway in our solar system.

The league covers expensive hardware lob matches held between planets in the Solar System. Two dwarf planets have recently been admitted to the league and lost their first matches against league champions Team Earth.

Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System

A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.

Rainbow spacecraft and how humanity might end (Interconnected)

I too am a member of The British Interplanetary Society and I too recommend it.

(Hey Matt, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole of solar sails, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed of Centauri Dreams—Paul Gilster is big into solar sails!)

Solar System and Beyond Poster Set | NASA Solar System Exploration

Beautiful high resolution posters of our planetary neighbourhood.

The Atlas of Moons

Take an interactive tour of our solar system’s many moons.

Earth day at Clearleft

Isn’t this just lovely?

Cassie made a visualisation of the power we’re getting from the solar panels we installed on the roof of the Clearleft building.

I highly recommend reading her blog post about the process too. She does such a great job of explaining how she made API calls, created SVGs, and calculated animations.

CodePen - Solar System 3D Animation (Pure CSS)

This orrery is really quite wonderful! Not only is it a great demonstration of what CSS can do, it’s a really accurate visualisation of the solar system.

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

This is fascinating! A website that’s fast and nimble, not for performance reasons, but to reduce energy consumption. It’s using static files, system fonts and dithered images. And no third-party scripts.

Thanks to a low-tech web design, we managed to decrease the average page size of the blog by a factor of five compared to the old design – all while making the website visually more attractive (and mobile-friendly). Secondly, our new website runs 100% on solar power, not just in words, but in reality: it has its own energy storage and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather.

Ping! That’s the sound of my brain going “service worker!”

I’ve sent them an email offering my help.

Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures – Center for Science and the Imagination

A collection of short stories and essays speculating on humanity’s future in the solar system. The digital versions are free to download.

SolarBeat

Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.

Hypnotic.