Engineering, Tech, Solarpunk and Climate Yays

[Jubal]

A thread for the yays that will help get the world through What Is To Come or will make people's lives better. Also because this is an area that often either gets wrapped up in chasing the latest iphones or military tech (both of which will be considered off-topic for this thread) or alternatively ends up in tech doom of various sorts, so a thread for climate, medical, resilient, and human(e) tech seems a nice thing to have.


To start off, the US is getting solar canals! There've been some really interesting innovations in working out what you can combine the shade of a solar panel with usefully, and this looks potentially very interesting. I don't know if it's at all confusing for birds that would fish in the canal, but at least according to the article it's a net positive location for wildlife and the effect on reduced transpiration is major:



Link:
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/the-us-is-about-to-get-its-first-solar-covered-canal

[dubsartur]

Seems to have some of the water-saving benefits of qanats?

A thing people have talked about is how road wear scales roughly with the fourth power of the ratio of weight to number of axles.  Since those ratios something like 0.1 for a bike, 1.0 for a car, and 10.0 for a fully-loaded truck, you can see that almost all wear on modern asphalt roads is from heavy vehicles (and why trucks often have to pay a special toll to use highways). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

Low-Tech Magazine talks about how new bicycles are becoming less sustainable https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/02/can-we-make-bicycles-sustainable-again/  It could emphasize more that Canadian aluminium is mostly made with hydro power and can be recycled so is a pretty green material.  They are more on the "degrowth" end of things than the "solarpunk" end although that is a matter of tone.

[Jubal]

Yes - larger and hopefully less labour intensive to clean than a qanat but a similar core principle.

I also found this piece on flood resilience and rice terracing interesting: conversely to needing to protect water, new weather systems also mean we might sometimes need to deal with a lot more of it. We've already had a lot of problems with this in the UK where canalisation of the upper stretches of rivers and over-use of building on floodplains has been making surge flooding in cities much commoner.

And yeah, I'd not thought a huge amount about general truck use on roads, though I'd certainly seen news stories about e.g. US local police forces buying armoured vehicles or tanks from the military and absolutely shredding small-town roads that were never built for vehicles of that weight.