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Solarpunk is plants on buildings (slrpnk.net)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/memes@slrpnk.net
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[–] 3 points 4 months ago (17 children)

Their word choice was poor, true. I wouldn't call them "robot slaves," because a robot isn't a person and therefore can't be enslaved. Your dishwasher isn't a slave. Your computer isn't a slave. Your printer isn't a slave.

I'm not here to back up a commenter from an .ml instance.

But, "exploitation" doesn't really fit here. How do you "exploit" a robot? It's not a person or even an animal, it doesn't have consciousness or sentience or however you want to define an entity with intrinsic worth deserving of rights.

You can call it a robot maid or a robot butler or a robot servitor or whatever you want. I wouldn't call it a slave or even a serf. But at the end of the day, it's just a robot. And if you run it on solar power and recycle parts to eliminate e-waste, then it can certainly fit with solarpunk.

Ecology is good, yes. Technology can work in harmony with ecology, if it's done right. The problem with our current society is that that's not among its values or priorities, so it designs technology aimed at increasing shareholder value or military dominance. If those values can be changed, and new priorities adopted, then technology can certainly go hand-in-hand with ecology.

But pastoralism will be essential to a solarpunk society, whether you want to admit that or not. Maybe the term comes with baggage because of how it's been implemented in the past, but we're not bound by the past. We can implement new ways of pastoralism.

If you want to support a large population, agriculture is essential. It can be done on a smaller-scale, and non-industrially, especially if you're just supporting a village or a small town. But that requires labor, and if you replace the brunt of that with robots, you free up hands for other tasks. The robots don't even have to be humanoid.

If you want to support entire cities, it's going to take a lot of agriculture. You can do vertical warehouse farming, sure, especially with agribots. But since you've already called out ecofascism, I can only assume the world you envision will have at least 8 billion mouths to feed. Maybe 12 or 15 billion by the time the population levels off on its own without any interventions. How do you plan to feed all those people without exploitation, environmental degradation, and industrial agriculture? I'm not saying you can't, or that you shouldn't try, but pragmatically you'll need to at least have an idea in order for it to be a realistic vision for the future.

Coexistence and decolonization are great, but there are still practical necessities that need to be addressed in order to maintain a society of any kind. "Ecology" is a great start, and a necessary counterbalance to the current state of the world; but long-term, if your vision doesn't include some rendition of "pastoralism + technology," then I just can't imagine how you plan to support a world with an exponentially growing human population...

And if you're not thinking about these things, then solarpunk seems to be very little more than an aesthetic to you.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    OK so firstly, when I say "exploitation", I mean in the economic sense. So you "exploit" the land to make a sugar plantation and then the plantation pulls all the resources out of the soil, you take the sugar and leave. This is basically what colonisation was, it was exploitation of people, yes, but also fundamentally of the entire ecosystem, the land, the water, and so on.

    Permaculture is in some ways a response to this, to take something already "degraded" and build back. So you take degraded soils, then you invest in those soils over years through a cycle, and you use nature to help you. Then you give nature the first spoils, and you take what remains. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking to pastoralism. While the solarpunk manifesto doesn't mention permaculture, it's pretty clear this is the intent.

    The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

    Part of the problem with the manifesto is that it expects a lot of prior knowledge. Most people don't know what "decolonialism" even is, so it just becomes a buzzword, but you can tell by the thoughtfulness of the way the manifesto is written that they have the prior knowledge, and expect that of the people reading it.

    The meme is about "what if everything white people did was right? Just add some plants to it!" and like, unless they actually contend with the history, that's the kind of solarpunk we'll get.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (15 children)

    Their word choice was poor, true. I wouldn’t call them “robot slaves,” because

    Exactly, robot already means slave so it means "mechanical slave's slave". So in my grand vision for the future, even the mechanical slaves get their own slaves!

    I’m not here to back up a commenter from an .ml instance.

    What you have against "machine learning"? FYI I'm not a stalinist.

    Anyway, I think pastoralism is fundamentally impossible for the vast majority when we have 12 billion people. We'll want high urban density to save energy and resources on infrastructure. What I personally envision is a single gigantic apartment block that stands along surrounded by miles of mixed fields, food forests and nature. Every apartment is a luxury apartment with an amazing view and you can just walk out and enjoy the communal gardens, or putter around in a small area reserved for you. I believe that would be the most energy and resource efficient way to live in nature. Pastoralism is only possible in a mostly empty country like the USA.

    And except using fusion power to create protein or something like rice and wheat grain analogues directly in bioreactors, it will never be efficient to do vertical farming. Converting sunlight into electricity to power grow lights is never more efficient than greenhouses tended to by farmbots.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (14 children)

    Exactly, robot already means slave so it means "mechanical slave's slave". So in my grand vision for the future, even the mechanical slaves get their own slaves!

    Holy shit, I hope this is sarcasm because if not you're delusional dude

    What you have against "machine learning"? FYI I'm not a stalinist.

    Just so you know, your instance is run by proud bolsheviks, not AI-researchers...

    What I personally envision is...

    Okay, that's fine in fiction as long as you don't care about sounding convincing, but in reality providing food, water, utilities, and living space to that many people is a bit more complex than that.

    And except using fusion power to create protein or something like rice and wheat grain analogues directly in bioreactors,

    That's not what fusion is. Nuclear fusion is only necessary for changing atoms into different elements. Bioreactors and protein synthesis are chemical reactions, not nuclear. They only change on the molecular level.

    it will never be efficient to do vertical farming.

    It might be less energy efficient, but if you have infinite solar generation that won't matter. Vertical warehouse farming is more efficient in terms of space, water consumption, fertilizer, and most every other externality such as pesticides, harvesting, etc.. It can even be hydroponic or aeroponic, using self-contained and circular systems, and almost every step can be automated.

    Converting sunlight into electricity to power grow lights is never more efficient than greenhouses tended to by farmbots.

    That won't be the main issue if you have infinite solar power, and farmbots can still be used in vertical warehouse farming. Single-layer greenhouses take up a lot of space though, especially if you need to produce enough to feed several billion people.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (13 children)

    I do in fact believe in communism. Just not in Stalinism and that kind of repression. Repression based on "ideological purity" that exists very much outside of socialism too you know? Just because I believe in communism doesn't make me evil or suspicious. And obviously I was joking about robot slaves. Are we done with this shit?

    Anyway we don't have infinite solar. Even kite power, the most efficient wind power costs resources and space. I generally do agree that energy isn't really the issue though, it's resources and infrastructure.

    If you have a small knee high greenhouse, it will always be more efficient to actually generate chemical energy than vertical farming. Just replace the photovoltaic panel with glass. And for most crops and sensible farming you don't need greenhouses anyway. Shit just grows in the dirt.

    Vertical farming calories (to actually feed people) can only be sensible if you have fusion power sometimes in the future. Fission power will eventually run out and is too expensive. Vertical farming is only used for salads and no calorie stuff, but it's fundamentally a dead end as a large scale solution.

    Also if you look at the most calorie efficient crops like corn, wheat and potatoes, you need about the size of France to produce enough calories for all 8 billion people. Space is not the issue. With advances in robotics and open source farm bots you can just grow the stuff in the ground without greenhouses and democratize the process.

    And about the arcology, instead of sitting in a city and growing and harvesting food or collecting water and and transporting all of it from far away, you just put it in nature and harvest all the basic things directly there using minimal energy. I mean water just falls down from the sky and only needs to be stored. You'd use solar or kite power for energy and grid scale batteries.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    There are anarcho-communist instances here, but the .ml admins are literal bolsheviks. As in, authoritarian communists who are notoriously all about that ideological purity and repression. You can find plenty of leftist comms here where people still shit on .ml for being authoritarian.

    I'm not saying that's you, because I've met the occasional .ml user who just wasn't aware when they made their account. But by and large, when you see an .ml user, it's usually little better than a troll. Hence the stigma, incase you start noticing a pattern.

    I'm not saying you're evil for believing in communism. If we were to discuss Marx philosophically, I'd agree on a lot of points. I generally like Merleau-Ponty's takes on Marxism. But I will continue to shit on any leninists out there when I encounter them.

    It's good to know you were joking about the robot slaves, thank you for clarifying. You should know that most people here won't respond well to "jokes" about slavery.

    For the rest of your comment, thank you for finally saying something intelligent. You're right, solar isn't literally infinite. Perhaps I should have said "virtually infinite," as once you have the infrastructure in place you can produce as much as it can capture without consuming additional resources, aside from maintenance.

    A skyscraper with solar panels covering its southern face can produce a lot of vegetables. Sure, maybe carb-heavy vegetables still need to be done outdoors, but a balanced diet requires more than carbs. And producing vegetables in vertical farms lets you do it much closer to the centers of population, eliminating some of the needs for transportation and storage.

    Grains and legumes might still need fields, but those also keep better and you can easily produce enough to store to make it through the following winter while still keeping a surplus. That's harder to do with leafy greens and other vegetables, which are still necessary for balanced nutrition.

    "you just put it in nature and harvest all the basic things directly there using minimal energy" is a really bad summary of agriculture, though.

    And not everywhere has enough rainfall to produce crops exclusively from catchment, especially now with glaciers melting and rivers going dry. Circular systems that can reuse moisture will be increasingly important as the world heats up.

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    A skyscraper with solar panels covering its southern face can produce a lot of vegetables. Sure, maybe carb-heavy vegetables still need to be done outdoors, but a balanced diet requires more than carbs.

    You need the chemical energy to survive and that requires a lot of light to convert. That is the "critical path". Forget about vegetables, they are not important to solving the food problem.

    You're so arrogant but fail to understand the basic engineering and math problems. This is a waste of time.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    You act so smug, but you don't seem to realize that warehouse farming is already a thing. This isn't some personal utopian fantasy theory of mine, it's a thing that already exists and can be implemented at a larger scale to solve problems ranging from food deserts, malnutrition, transportation costs, winter spoilage, pests, water consumption, run-off, and habitat destruction due to the agricultural demands of feeding several billion people.

    There are specific wavelengths of light that plants use to do photosynthesis. Those wavelengths can be isolated, and there are special LEDs designed specifically for this purpose. They're quite efficient. Or you can use fluorescent lights, albeit they're less efficient than LEDs. You don't need the full spectrum and intensity of direct sunlight, and in fact that can be harmful in hot/dry climates or during droughts, especially as global warming accelerates. Warehouse agriculture has much higher yields than outdoor farming because you can control the climate perfectly while keeping out pests and diseases.

    As for fertilizers and compost, they can be used in warehouse agriculture with more efficiency and with less environmental impact than in conventional farm fields. So your chemical energy point is moot.

    You talk to me of the engineering and math problems, but clearly you're the one who fails to understand them.

    Don't you know how much environmental destruction is currently due to clearing more space for agriculture? And you think that won't get worse as the world population nearly doubles in size, unless we start doing multi-story warehouse farming to feed major population centers?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (9 children)

    you don’t seem to realize that warehouse farming is already a thing.

    No, you're just wrong. It is a thing for profitable vegetables or leafy greens or strawberries, but not for producing calories. It will not feed 15 billion people.

    With something like 3 kWh of solar irradiance per day per m² you get a pretty abysmal <5% efficiency for producing food calories compared to the 20% efficiency of solar panels. So you quintuple the amount of land you need with solar panels, maybe a little less with higher efficiency indoors. Less with kite power. Again less with fusion power. It's still alot of embedded energy.

    I made this table to see how many square meters actually feeds a person, very rough numbers but all I've found. It's less than 250m² in moderate climates to produce 2.2 kcal food. If we stop eating meat and "luxury foods" from around the world we drastically reduce energy costs and reduce land use so we can rewild like 90% of the current arable land.

    Conclusion: There is no shortage of land to feed 15 billion people.

    And why grow your vegetables and fruits and strawberries far off, or in a bunker, when you can build a million local greenhouses in your community that could additionally serve as food gardens or parks in colder weather?
    Kcal / acre / year Kcal / m² / day kWh / m² / day Efficiency from 3kWh sunlight Land m² / person Protein %
    Potato 15,000,000 10.0 0.0116 0.39% 219 9.50%
    Potato Ireland 2017 FAO 14,163,653 9.5 0.0110 0.37% 232 9.50%
    Potato USA 2019 FAO 15,858,541 10.6 0.0123 0.41% 207 9.50%
    Potato Oregon 2019 USDA 20,940,336 14.0 0.0162 0.54% 157 9.50%
    Potato Simplify Gardening 18,036,045 12.1 0.0140 0.47% 182 9.50%
    Sweet potato 3x hypothetical 93,000,000 62.2 0.0721 2.40% 35 7.00%
    Rice 11,000,000 7.4 0.0085 0.28% 299 8.10%
    Rice USA 2018 FAO 14,655,018 9.8 0.0114 0.38% 224 8.10%
    Soybeans 6,271,628 4.2 0.0049 0.16% 525 36.40%
    Chickpeas 6,013,636 4.0 0.0047 0.16% 547 20.50%
    Chickpeas China FAO 8,329,810 5.6 0.0065 0.22% 395 20.50%
    Chickpeas Israel 2017 FAO 9,494,407 6.3 0.0074 0.25% 347 20.50%
    Chickpeas Turkey 1,440,259 1.0 0.0011 0.04% 2284 20.50%
    Pinto Beans 23.70%
    Corn 15,000,000 10.0 0.0116 0.39% 219 10.40%
    Corn Jordan 2018 FAO 58,323,364 39.0 0.0452 1.51% 56 10.40%
    Corn USA 2018 FAO 18,413,214 12.3 0.0143 0.48% 179 10.40%
    Wheat 4,000,000 2.7 0.0031 0.10% 822 14.50%
    Wheat Ireland 2017 15,670,035 10.5 0.0122 0.41% 210 14.50%
    Oats 175 bu/acre 1,125,399 0.8 0.0009 0.03% 2923 17.00%
    Chlorella 86,045,604 57.5 0.0667 2.22% 38 58.40%
    Solein solarfoods.fi 193,371,336 129.3 0.1500 5.00% 17 65.00%
    Microalgae 5% hypothetical 193,371,336 129.3 0.1500 5.00% 17 57.47%

    PS: Solein claims 5% by splitting water into hydrogen using solar power and then using hydrogen to feed single celled organisms. If we ever find a way to split water into hydrogen directly using fusion we'd be set. But until then it's not more efficient than other food algae (also about 5% efficient, which is already great for mostly protein).

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (8 children)

    If you think leafy greens are only good for making a profit, then you're the one who's wrong. Nutrition is about more than just calories. Someone who doesn't get enough calories gets malnourished, someone who doesn't get enough nutrients gets malnutrition. It's two different things. Vegetables are necessary and you can't just write them off, much as you seem to want to.

    Also, a vertical warehouse operation has multiple stories and can have panels mounted all up the southern face. You don't need to have an entirely horizontal solar farm, so no it doesn't quintuple the land you need.

    And yes, eliminating meat from the common diet can help to rewild arable land, but that's a completely separate conversation and not an argument against warehouse agriculture.

    Saying there's no shortage of land to feed 15 billion people is irresponsible though, because without any major changes to the way things are done, feeding 15 billion people would absolutely result in more habitat destruction.

    And why grow your vegetables and fruits and strawberries far off, or in a bunker, when you can build a million local greenhouses in your community that could additionally serve as food gardens or parks in colder weather?

    You don't seem to understand the issue at all. Building a million "local" greenhouses takes up space. Each greenhouse has a footprint. The millionth one over won't be very "local."

    The point of warehouse farming (rather, one of the points), is that it can be done in urban centers where there's no space for greenhouses. It's literally a solution for food deserts and transport costs associated with the majority of food being produced in rural areas. Warehouse agriculture brings food production closer to population centers. I've already pointed that out multiple times and you just seem to ignore it.

    If we ever find a way to split water into hydrogen directly using fusion we'd be set.

    That's not what fusion is at all. I've already corrected you on this, which you also ignored.

    Nuclear fusion is when you take two atoms and fuse them into a different kind of atom. The simplest form is making one helium atom from two hydrogen isotopes.

    It has nothing to do with "splitting water into hydrogen." We can already do that. It's called electrolysis. Plants need more than just hydrogen though, so I'm not sure what your point is there.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (7 children)

    That’s not what fusion is at all.

    You didn't correct me, you misunderstood me. Keep up lol. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolysis#Hydrogen_production

    Solein (single celled microorganism) can use hydrogen and oxygen as fuel to produce carbo hydrates and protein. Needs co2 and some minerals too of course. If you could genetically engineer it to taste good and look less like puke, it would be perfect.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (6 children)

    Okay, good luck with that. You go feed your people hydroslop and I'll build warehouse farms and we'll see whose people have better nutrition.

    Also, the radiolysis page says nothing about fusion. The nuclear waste it talks about repurposing is from fission reactors. Keep up.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (5 children)

    More radiation, more hydrogen splitting. Anyway it was just an idea which you took to imply I don't even understand what fusion is.

    But the overall point is that you don't need anything like this. If you stop producing meat and resource or energy inefficient foods like almonds we have more than enough land to feed even 20 billion people. There is no need to invent superfood or vertical farming. It's not the critical path. Much more important is saving heating and cooling in buildings and reducing the amount of transport and infrastructure spread we need.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    Except fusion waste isn't radioactive, it's just helium. The fuel is literally already hydrogen, so I don't know why you would even want to fuse hydrogen into helium just to try to split a water molecule. You literally do electrolysis to split the water to get the hydrogen to use in a fusion reactor to make helium and release a ton of energy. There's no radioactive material involved.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    This is just speculation, more like a "if someone figures it out". We don't have working fusion yet anyway. Fusion does produce radiation, which can be used to split additional water. Or maybe this might be impossible with a fusion reactor setup. Normally the radiation is used to heat water and convert it into steam to drive a turbine. But specifically to grow food, hydrogen production could be more efficient. Say in a space colony too far away from the sun.

    Otherwise, light and photosynthesis will basically always be the most efficient to grow calories for sustenance.

    BTW there is also the concept of aneutronic fusion to directly generate electricity without steam turbines.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    There's no "figuring it out." Fusion waste isn't radioactive. You can't do radiolysis with it.

    There's a difference between radiation and radioactivity. Heat and light are radiation. Radiolysis requires radioactivity.

    It's not "more efficient" to take hydrogen, apply fusion to turn it into helium and generate power, and then use that power to "split" water molecules.

    You already have the hydrogen from doing the electrolysis. The closest thing you could do is capture the power generated by the fusion and convert it into electricity, and then use that electricity to do more electrolysis. I'd have to look at the specific numbers to calculate loss, because fusion is weird and generates enormous amounts of energy, but it also isn't captured with 100% efficiency. And besides, it takes power to run the fusion reactors, which is currently the main hurdle in the way of running it at scale.

    If you're in a space colony though, water is too precious to be splitting into hydrogen and helium. You would probably just get your hydrogen directly from a gas giant instead.

    Otherwise, light and photosynthesis will basically always be the most efficient to grow calories for sustenance.

    So we've come full circle, and you've admitted that nuclear fusion cannot generate calories. Great.

    You also continue to ignore macro- and micro- nutrients. Dietary requirements are more than just "calories."

    Lastly, aside from aneutronic fusion being hardly more experimental than it is theoretical, that's a complete red herring and has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    So we’ve come full circle, and you’ve admitted that nuclear fusion cannot generate calories. Great.

    Sure it can't, because it doesn't exist. I said that outside some fantastical sci-fi technology like fusion directly producing hydrogen, sunlight will always be more efficient to produce calories. And you only need a radiation source for radiolysis, radioactive waste is only one source of it.

    Every single method we have to produce chemical energy is less efficient than sunlight and plants.

    Because solar panels, LEDs, hydrolysis, all have low efficiency. You loose massive amounts of energy and therefor space when your goal is to produce calories.

    And sure we need vegetables and for that vertical farming is fine, great even, except for calories. But if we wanted to solve climate change, the infrastructure like solar panels and pumps contain a lot of embedded energy that you could save. It's only profitable under capitalism and land hoarding and in a society where we consume way too much meat.

    One economic collapse or global conflict and all our complex supply chains go away. So if we're dependent on tractors and heavy machinery and fossil fuel and fertilizers, or on or robots and electronics or LEDs or solar panels just to produce food - the vast majority of people remain slaves to industry for their very basic needs.

    The real solarpunk for me is potato farming. Or some sci-fi genetic engineering to produce shrubs that produce all sorts of food without needing tilling or fertilizer.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    So much of what you're saying is actually an argument in favor of warehouse farming and you don't even realize it, that it's obvious you've never read the requisite literature, and I'm done trying to explain this to you.

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