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Not meaning to sound pessimistic, but steampunk is powered primarily off coal right? Doesn’t that cause a lot of pollution? Especially if we have multiple airships and a flying city? Do we have an alternative fuel? Or some way to clean the smoke?

I thinkest, we need to further our advances into hydrogen power! Hydrogen being the most abundant material in the universe thus far, (apart from dark matter), it would benefit us if all things ran on hydrogen. The only emission is life-giving water! Still, hydrogen power wouldn't work too well in space, seeing as it required oxygen as well to run, and in space, oxygen is rather limited.

So for all non-space related ventures, I propose we use fuel-cell hydrogen technologies. For all space-related ventures, we can stick to good ol' steam. (Steaaaam Trek!) There's no harm in polluting the vacuum of space is there? It is infinite. D:

Rejected. Nuclear power produces waste that we've yet to figure out how to deal with. It poisons the environment. We're sticking mainly to earth, so I don't think it's a good idea to pollute it.



While a good idea in theory, it wouldn't be wise either. Space itself has no mass, thus there is nothing that would cause any gasses we dump into it to disperse. It will eventually make it's way back to earth, or another planet with gravity. Because gas doesn't have mass the same way space junk does, it wouldn't burn up, just add itself to the atmosphere, created a dangerous pocket in the ozone of the planet in question.



Now we're talking. Great idea, is it still considered steampunksih? or should our definition of steampunk change slightly for the sake of safety and the environment?

You don't get to reject things that easily! Nuclear power runs on something that is abundant and yet holds more energy proportional to mass than any other source of fuel we know of. It does not of itself 'poison' the environment, so long as the waste is contained, which we are very much capable of doing, to the level that any radiation leakage is no worse than that already released by Uranium in its un-processes form anyway, and can be to some degrees safer so long as it is properly managed, which we can do.
It is quite possible the least of the evils in regards to damage to the environment out of all the options we have, even hydrogen power. It produces no harmful gasses, it takes nothing that the Earth needs, what it does produce can be managed to cause little or no harm, and it is small (removing the huge environmental and habitatual damage causes by things like hydroelectric dams



Maybe, or quite possibly it would cloud in its own mass in a similar way to a nebula. Either way it would take so long to fall, and would more likely be taken in by stars anyway, rather than planets.



It is still steampunk so long as there is steam.
But it is only environmentally freindly so long as we use little of the hydrogen we have (what with taking it away messing with the rest of our atmosphere - with CO2 concentrations increasing whenever we taken some from the atmosphere, which gets smaller too.
Now, you could say we could always get more from water, and yes this would do fine in storing hydrogen for use to provide energy, but the electrolysis required to get hydrogen uses more energy than will be produced later, running at a net loss that must be accounted for in some way, by prodcuing power by some other means.

Its okay...I understand. Your concerns are valid...just I do see it as I said as a lesser of evils.

The best power I have seen in fusion power (hot), which also uses Hydrogen but in far smaller quantities for an even greater power output. More energy comes out than goes in, and their are not polluting products. It is also extremely safe. Despite the fact that it is plasma youhave fusing away in there (fusion being the opposite of fission as used in most nuclear plants for those who may not know), as soon as the plasma escapes the magnetic field (ooo...science fiction-y), as soon as it touches anything it cools so rapidly that no damage is done.

Yay! Sadly though it isn;t steam, else I would have mentioned it earlier.

EDIT: Aw, Imber beat me to it.



Actually, the waste produced is rather small, and that which is produced can all (I emphasize all) be safely stored inside of a single mountain (in the real world, Yucca Mountain) in an isolated desert climate. Current fossil fuel usage creates orders of magnitude more pollution, including those oft-reviled greenhouse gases, which are usually just dumped wherever.



Actually, no. Fact is, huge amounts of gas are escaping from the planet every day. While Earth has a substantial gravitational pull, its strength in the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere is negligible compared to the average kinetic energy of the particles up there. The same thing applies to the gravitational attraction of the individual gas molecules, which is paltry compared to their average kinetic energies and distances apart; for one to not to quickly disperse to any appreciable degree, a gas cloud's size would have to be on the order of a planet.



A good chunk of the hydrogen that isn't already chemically bonded to something else (and thus useless for hydrogen fuel cells) is in stars, which aren't keen to giving up their fuel. Most of the rest is scattered about space at a density of about one atom per cubic meter. If you wanted to collect just one kilogram of the stuff floating around, you'd have to gather from more than half an octillion (6.02 x 10E26) cubic meters of space. This then leaves one tethered to whatever hospitable planet could supply the fuel, and in Earth's case there is a lot more hydrocarbon and nuclear fuel than there is free hydrogen.

Conclusions: Antimatter FTW. Nuclear is cool. And fossil fuel pollution doesn't really hurt space.

Have waste problems? Let's dump our junk on Mars. D: