06-16-2018, 08:31 AM | #31 | |
Join Date: May 2018
Location: Savannah, GA
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
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I also remember when it dawned on me that we still have one foot in the Age of Steam. I'm not a scientist or an engineer, but it seems we're pretty much stuck with muscle power, radiant heat, moving fluids, steam pressure, electricity, and combustion. (Did I miss anything?) Many people seem to see it all as magical crystalline engines that push cars and tv shows. In the context of a Solarpunk rpg setting, barring the supernatural and handwavium, what else might there be? |
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06-16-2018, 08:57 AM | #32 |
Join Date: May 2018
Location: Savannah, GA
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
Also, it might be possible for a solarpunk civilization to harness the power of volcanoes and lightning- not as in machine generation, but directly, i.e. volcano mills, lightning catchers, &c. Whenever you add -punk to the setting, exotic seems to be the standard.
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06-16-2018, 09:07 AM | #33 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
A world without fossil fuels can develop along a familiar path, more or less, until charcoal becomes inadequate for the amount of metal smelting, ceramic firing, and so on that's needed. In our history, that gap was filled by coke, and the need for coal to be mined to make coke grew vastly as the industrial revolution got going.
With no coal, having our kind of industrial revolution is impractical. Jumping to nuclear power is too much of a stretch, IMHO. Something that could be built is a solar furnace, with a large number of mirrors, each pointed by hand. "Sun-miners" have different occupational diseases from coal-miners, but the job is likewise dull and difficult.
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06-16-2018, 09:19 AM | #34 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
Yes, other than generating geothermal energy through the decay of radioactive isotopes in the depths of the Earth, fission is just a rounding error for natural energy production. It is fusion, specifically the proton-proton fusion process, that drives the production of energy in the Sun (and it was more energetic fusion processes or exotic processes like photoerosion that created everything larger than helium-4). And quite frankly, any rational society would have made the necessary investments to replicate solar fusion instead of trying to develop a form of fusion that could consume the products of fission (tritium) as the major fuel.
I can imagine a society without fossil fuels avoiding fission entirely and focusing its efforts on fusion. Without the nuclear armed nations forcing researchers to focus on DT fusion, they would have likely developed nuclear fusion by their equivalent of the 1990s. With a smaller population of 2 billion or so, a higher percentage of their people could have been devoted to R&D rather than being wasted doing subsistence farming or urban scrounging (the two of which 'employ' fifty percent of the global population in 2018). The resulting world could be a more advanced world by their equivalent of 2018, but it would look much more different than our 2018. |
06-24-2018, 11:33 PM | #35 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
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06-25-2018, 08:40 AM | #36 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
Actually, that is incorrect. Proton-proton fusion takes advantage of quantum tunneling (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansi.../#1a4da57c43f7). It is because of quantum tunneling that proton-proton fusion occurs at much lower temperatures than other forms of fusion. Otherwise, 95% of stars would be too cold to undergo fusion and would just be large masses of cold matter.
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06-25-2018, 08:48 AM | #37 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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06-25-2018, 09:30 AM | #38 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
Matter of perspective perhaps. I think solar levels of p-p fusion are doable in the lab, but the problem is that the rate is just too slow to be *useful*. The actual amount of fusion taking place in stars is after all very, very low, but since stars are also very, very large, the product of really slow x really huge comes out to be significant.
To get 100 MW of luminosity (a rather small power plant these days) out of the material in the solar core, you need more than 10^11 kg of it - so at the current (roughly 70 cents a kilogram) price of hydrogen that's $70 billion just for the fuel, never mind the cost of heating and containing it. And containment on a chunk of super high density plasma a kilometer in diameter isn't a trivial problem either....
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06-25-2018, 10:04 AM | #39 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
Incidentally, as a minor technical note, a significant part of the heat from the Earth's core is not radioactive in origin; it's the heat of crystallization of impure iron accreting onto the Earth's solid inner core as the outer core cools.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
06-26-2018, 09:46 PM | #40 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: Solarpunk World Building
It might solve the problem that fusion has of losing a lot of the energy you put in to get the plasma hot enough to fuse to radiative and conductive heat loss. Get it that big and the square cube law is on your side.
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