Finding Sol

Consider the sun.

Now consider me.  Now back to the sun, now back to me.

"I am the sun your sun could smell like."

The sun is basically a huge nuclear explosion.  Very nearly all of the energy on earth comes from the sun.  And it's a lot of energy.  The sun produces 3.8 x 10²⁶ Joules per second of energy.  Of that, the Earth gets 1.8 x 10¹⁷ Joules every second.  Is that a lot?  Think of it this way:  The sun is transforming 8,000,000,000 pounds of material into energy every second.  Of those eight billion pounds, Earth is getting four and a half - not four and a half billion.  Four and a half pounds total..

Chili's: a day's worth of calories
in hamburger form.

Does that not seem like much?  Consider this:  the total energy consumption of the entire human race - homes, cars, factories, farms, everything - is about 1/10,000 of that.

Does any of this relate to milk, or Breakstone's sour cream in any way?  We can only hope.

The average adult needs about 2,000 calories a day.  That's 8,368 Kilojoules every day.  The earth is getting 180 trillion Kilojoules from the sun every second.  If we could convert sunlight directly into food energy, we could feed 21.5 billion people a second.  We could, using the sun's energy, feed every single person on planet earth for the entire day in a little less than a third of a second.

2.7 hours of this and nobody on earth
 will have to eat for eighty years.

Unfortunately, people can't eat sunlight.  In fact, except for production of Vitamin D, sunlight is completely useless as a source of energy for the human body.  You could live just as well in a cave or, say, Scotland.

Our inability to eat the sun, though poetic, is hardly universal.  What we need is a way to turn solar energy into available calories.  Tomorrow:  Grass.