![]() ![]() We learned to bypass these indirect routes of harnessing the Sun by making solar panels that generate electrical power directly from the sunshine itself. We also learned to use the geothermal power within the Earth – first from hot springs, and increasingly by digging deeper. Even tidal power, mostly driven by the Moon, also depends on the Sun – to stop the water from freezing. Heat from the Sun creates weather which we have tapped with windmills and then turbines. We learned to extract dead life, compressed beneath the earth, in the form of coal, oil and natural gas, for warmth and industry. ![]() The increasingly rapid improvement of our lives since then would have been impossible without more and cheaper energy. Sunshine caused water to evaporate from the oceans and then fall as rain, which we used to drive mills and then generators. We tamed animals to carry us and to help us grow food. To keep warm, we burned sunlight stored as wood, and learned to use it to cook. ![]() In time, we learned to tap that energy in other forms. To begin with, the only energy we harvested was that fixed by photosynthesis in plants, creating the sugars that have fed humanity since its origins. Since the dawn of the species, we have learned to harness ever more energy per person. Without radically better technology, any life remaining on Earth at that point – which, for all we know, may be all life in the universe – will end. Billions of years from now, the Sun’s increasing temperature will render the Earth barren, before it goes dark altogether. Unless one day we learn to control and transform them entirely, we must live with stars as best we can. Collapsed stars, like the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way, eat other stars. Solar storms could destroy our electrical grids or satellites. Currents stirred by heat within the Earth cause volcanoes and earthquakes. Radiation from the Sun causes cancers, and storms that sink ships and flatten homes. Stars furnish the power on which life depends.Īs well as life, stars bring death. The Earth is warmed by the radiation from decaying stardust within. We, and the world around us, are mainly the dust of long dead stars our food, the same stardust transformed by the power of another star, our Sun. ![]()
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