Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-08-04

The Thinking Tithe

Every socket in the plaza pays a thin bright tithe of current to the parenthesis that thinks.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A large diagram-like drawing on a warm rose-gray field, made entirely of straight lines, circular arcs, and round dots in three fixed stroke weights. One heavy magenta line enters at the left edge and steps through the square in right-angled runs with rounded corners, exiting at the right — the plaza's distribution bus. Thirteen charging bays are scattered across the field, none central. Each is a medium-weight machine drawn in plum outline: wheeled carriers, tank cars, a gantry crane, an instrument console under a canopy arc, a spoked cable reel on a trestle. Beside every machine a pair of facing arcs forms a parenthesis with a dot at its center; a medium magenta tap line runs from a dot on the bus, through the parenthesis, and on into the machine. From each parenthesis center a hairline magenta line rises into a small flat spiral, and a dotted magenta thread continues upward to a dotted dark arc that crosses the whole upper field. Beneath each machine a row of five small circles is partly filled with magenta. Three bays are drawn in pale chalk with no magenta, standing idle. At right, a giant deep-fuchsia parenthesis in the heaviest weight encloses its own dot and spiral. A faint chalk paving grid and one long chalk arc suggesting a dome span the background. No text or lettering appears anywhere.
An artistic imagining of a public charging plaza in a Mars city, drawn as a Sutnar-style information-flow page: the heavy magenta line is the plaza bus, and every bay is a repeated catalog unit where current must pass through a parenthesis to be metered. Most of the current goes on into the vehicle, tool, or civic machine; the hairline that spirals away from each parenthesis is the small share of power spent on the computing that negotiates, meters, and reports the transaction — real fast-charge stations likewise spend a few percent of throughput running their own control and metering computers, and the fainter chalk bays are thinking even with nothing drawing. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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