“How will we travel in the Solarpunk utopia?” Smooth brains at r/solarpunk imagine a world without planes

They are the temporarily embarrassed capitalists Steinbeck was talking about.

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise heck with Sunday picknickers on her property.

I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”

Forcing them to extrapolate on their utopic beliefs can be entertaining if they're so airheaded they don't realize you're mocking them.

OK cool, so you and your friends have abolished capitalism and money--hooray for you! Let's take that vacation you wanted! Oh wait. How are you going to get fuel for your vehicle? Capitalism is gone, remember? The rat race is over. No one is around anymore to sell you fuel. Guess you're walking.

So 700 miles and a pair of VERY tired feet later, you made it to Utopia Beach! Now let's find our hotel and--oh wait. There is no hotel. They're all closed because well, we don't need businesses anymore! Can't pick any random room though, the hotels are all filled with free, stinky hobos of questionable mental stability.

Sounds like fun.

I hope they do start flyling hydrogen dirigbles

>hydrogen filled

I mean you could do those things if you worked your butt off

I didn't realize that “temporarily embarrassed capitalist” was dunking on commies lol

!anticommunists

It's unironically blackpilling to look at stuff like the American time use survey and see that all this labor saving tech basically just leads to more tv and phone usage. Sure I'm guilty of it too, I'm peepeeing around on a gay cat website right now, but all this lofty talk about writing a novel in the morning, sheparding sheep in the evening. The best commies would get with antiwork/luxury communism or whatever it's called is even more people watching the Today Show, but with red banners

FML, you beat me to it.

Or a plane for that matter.

No the current working class and such would still work and do everything but it would be for the love of the craft and community whereas anime appraisers would be free to take months long voyages on algae powered blimps.

I really don't understand how they expect their utopia to function. It's like they think we live in a post scarcity society and if we just got rid of capitalism everyone would have everything they want and could do whatever they want. I could at least respect them a bit if they wanted the government to decide on everyone's jobs and distribute resources equally.

I want them to explain to me, in detail, how they would make a pencil.

I want them to figure out how to cut the tree, how to get the metal for the saw, how to get the machinery to dig the ore, how to get the energy to run the machine, etc.

"but who will tend to the fields?"

"Why the slaves, of course"

>no longer people will look at someone else from another country as another species because we will all travel around the world.

i would kill myself day one in india and probably view them as even less human

It's just a selection effect, really. Think about who has the time to spend complaining about things all day on the internet. Spoiled kids.

Well, and bored retirees, but they're mostly either on Facebook or screaming at the television.

That and people attracted to teenagers (Vaush stans)

ye

Where do you get the food for your month-long trip? Gonna tend to a little vegan garden on the boat?

I voted for Biden because he promised me backyard fission reactors.

Where are my small modular reactors, BIDEN?!

Where the frick are they?

!math hydrogen lifts about 1.2kg per cubic meter, good lithium batteries are about 250Wh/kg. 11,000km range, 100 seats, energy = efficiency * distance * seats.

I got about 880,000kg of batteries and 733,000 cubic meters of hydrogen. I assumed about 200Wh/km for the efficiency based on googling “how efficient are electric aircraft”.

I did not include air resistance because rigid airships are so slow that it's not very relevant.

I assumed 125 bucks per kWh for batteries. So this machine costs 27.5 million dollars in batteries alone. A 777 probably does cost more than that, I think they run like 300 mil, so this idea is only stupid for the other sixteen thousand reasons it's stupid.

That all check out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft there were several engine prototype constructed. I think one of the designs was just putting a small nuclear reactor in the combustion chamber of a turbojet engine, so it would go white hot and heat the air directly, no gay intermediate working fluids or anything like that. Naturally under such conditions it would ablate and produce highly radioactive debris in the exhaust.

Electric planes are simply far from being as efficient as jet planes and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. As for why do they bother if it's all fantasy anyway? Because they want to use “existing technology” for their utopia and despise “techbro” solutions (they haaaate carbon capture for instance), so they focus on trains, sail boats and dirigibles as they already exist.