The world's first carbon-14 diamond has been produced with the potential to provide power for thousands of years.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/diamonds-are-forever-world-first-carbon-14-diamond-battery-made #solarpunk #cyberpunk #solarpunkart #sciencefiction #future #community #ecopunk
@inkican
This is extremely useful in some very specialized cases. Note: there's virtually nothing it contributes to a #solarpunk or #ecopunk future.
The naming error is being used to get good PR, but this is not a battery. It's a miniature generator. It doesn't stop releasing energy if you don't need it. That's wonderful for long mission space craft, and might eventually be used for extremely low powered continuously operated devices that need to be embedded in inaccessible places with no source of light or harvestable movement.
It's a great device, but please don't call it a battery and pretend that its relevant to ecological improvement.
@PhilipVWilson yeah, we need something that can store a summer's worth of overflow energy and release it (at will, gradually) in winter.
Conversely: I often see solarpunk through the lens of how fiction inspires action. And while what you say is true, most materials science & physics research doesn't have obvious practical applications.
Still, a lot of it provides fodder for imagining positive futures. This science definitely has the kind of pizazz that generates stories that radicalize people, which is possibly as impactful as practical technologies.