Solar Power

The idea of solar power is sometimes dumbed down to mean solar panels and circuits driven by same. The idea of circuits is not wrong, it’s just that the big wheels were all turning long before humans inserted their rotational requirements, in the form of water wheel driven millstones and so on. The sun has been powering evaporation, condensation, rainfall and flows through streams to rivers to the ocean since time immemorial. 

We need not fixate on the sun as our one and only power input. The traveling of the planet through space in an orbital rotating formation, in tandem with our moon, is owing to the sun in a different sense, we could put it. Instead of radiated energy as a result of matter fusing to itself, the mere presence of that mass results in precessional patterns in its surroundings, such as ocean tides, and per the formation of a solar system in the first place. 

Furthermore, we have the geothermal throbbing of the planet itself, again owing to gravity, but also to geological chemistry, which includes melting and boiling points. We have vulcanism, lava flows, geothermal sources of heat.

What solar energy powers is our whole “terrarium” which is likewise our “aquarium” in terms of heat but also circuitry, pathways, channels. 

Photosynthesis turns soil minerals farmed through bacteria into the root systems of seedlings able to sprout stems and leaves, engines of self regeneration. Carnivorous life preys upon the herbivore layer. We get our pyramids of self actualization, our Ponzi schemes, our carnivals. Thanks to gravity squeezing out energy.

Whereas photosynthesis is naturally occurring, with humans yet to duplicate it artificially, where biomimicry achieves the most is in a parallel physiology done in metals, plastics, conductors and insulators, current generators. Conductors through control panels to actuators keep us within cybernetic loops of our own design. 

Consciously implementing experimentally trial-by-error designs, new schemes within nature, is our signature activity.

In the School of Tomorrow curriculum, we look a lot at the hydropower economy of the Silicon Forest, as Cascadian Synergetics is deliberately place-based. Oscilloscopes and trigonometry, energy conservation, alternating and direct current, series and parallel circuits… these are topics one expects in a bioregion focused on metrology, the science of precise mensuration, ala Tektronix and ESI. 

What impedes the flow of current and how? How does resistive impedance differ from capacitive impedance, in terms of waveforms? 

We’re allowing the practical elements of Motherboard Earth to stay in focus even is we probe the generalized principles (the so-called “natural laws”). We’ll be thinking about hydropower dams, what they do, how they work, as early as we think about astronomy more generally, and our civilizational context. Geography may begin with a local grid, a Dufur, but then we zoom out to see where our Dufur is, in relation to, say, Mars. Martian Maths is one of our four maths in our Digital Mathematics.