#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.
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.