#solarpunk story idea: a world after the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome .
The satellites fell into each other, the orbit is just a cloud of shrapnel. We can't catch them all and won't be able to launch anything for the next 500 years or so.
We're grounded, for being a bad civilization not thinking about consequences.
Infrastructurally it's not good, but it's not an all-out apocalypse. Planes still fly, ships still sail, even if slower. No weather monitoring or satellite photography though.
What interests me in this world though is the powerful symbolism and the philosophical, spiritual meaning:
We're grounded. Literally. Figuratively.
We have the next few hundred years to sort out our problems of being an unsustainable civilization without orbital umbrellas, just by _being better_. This can breed a new, powerful social movement, with a huge and grim reminder visible every day: the skies beyond are not for us. Not for the next few generations.
I think such a world has a huge potential for #solarpunk optimism: the universality of the belief that we need to be better. Getting us out of our stagnation.
No more Muskian dreams of Mars, our hopes for Space shattered for half a millenium at least. No asteroid mining.
We need to do better with what we have.
We are grounded, but we are alive and we can fix our mistakes.
@lakoja my take is that #solarpunk is about realism and extending our perspectives to what we cannot imagine - and what we cannot see around us right now.
I have a collection of realistic story ideas ( https://alxd.org/22-solarpunk-communities-and-story-hooks.html ), but I think there is a lot to be explored in how Big Events and their effect on societies.
An event like this could change a lot by showing people that we can think differently, the same way Covid showed us we don't need to be only about work and infinite growth.
@lakoja I think there's a lot of space for exploration in this.
There's a point why it's so hard to imagine a better future, a world where we deal with Big Problems: we tend to default to apocalypses.
Instead, we could explore: what if we take a traumatic societal event and treat it as a lesson?
If we have this research done, stories ready in the popular culture, the next time something like this happens, more people can start thinking like this, without fatalism and giving up.
@alxd But isn't #solarpunk already about realistic approaches (that do not destroy earth).
And all external stimuli for it like wide-spread wildfires are already in place.
So I doubt a bit that an event like that would change much in the sense of behavior of the most.