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Jan. 22, 2011 There are a couple of notions widely entertained by the general public that have no basis in fact. Frankly, I don't know where these ideas come from, but I suspect they have something to do with Christianity. One idea is that everything in creation has a purpose, and the other is that there is no waste in the nature of things, when the books are all balanced. I vaguely recall a poem by Robert Frost in which he said that, working in his garden, he could see that God wasted nothing in the worldly economy, that the leaves fell, were composted, became rich, black soil and bore a new season of fruit and flower, etc. But the sun is an almost infinitely wasteful entity. Just how wasteful it is can be seen by anyone who can afford a $10 calculator. From this Wiki page, it can be seen that the mean distance from the sun to the earth is 1.496E11 meters. This is 149,600,000,000 meters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit Given that the surface area of a sphere is equal to 4 x pi x r^2, we can easily figure that if we imagine a sphere centered on the sun with its surface at the center of the earth, the area of the sphere will be 2.812E23 square meters, or 281.2 billion trillion square meters. The area of a circle is, of course, equal to pi x r^2. From another Wiki page, we can see that the radius of the earth is 6.371E6 meters, bearing in mind that we are using meters rather than kilometers. So the area of the disk that the earth forms when viewed from afar is 1.275E14 square meters, which is 127.5 trillion square meters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_radius Dividing the area of the surface of the large sphere by the area of the earthly disk, we get a quotient of 2.205E9, which is 2,205,000,000, say, 2 billion in round figures. What this means is that only one part out of 2 billion parts of solar energy leaving the sun is incident on the upper limit of the stratosphere of the earth. The other 1,999,999,999 parts of solar energy are just dissipated uselessly into outer space. Of course, by the time the sun's light reaches the stars, it is starlight. I suppose it could conceivably be an aid to navigation somewhere, but navigators in the stars could manage splendidly without it too. The livelihood of individual human beings and of the whole human race depends on energy. There is always an energy crunch everywhere on the planet. If we could just multiply the amount of energy available to us 4 or 5 times, we'd all be well-fed, healthy and happy. And here's the sun, squandering 2 billion times as much energy as we have to live on! So what is the purpose of all this wasted energy? Surely the sun has no conception of economy as human beings understand it. It is a matter of complete indifference to the sun and to whoever or whatever created the sun, if anyone or anything did create the sun, what becomes of this vast outpouring of energy. Adding insult to injury, some galaxies have as many as 100 trillion stars like the sun, all wasting nearly 100% of their energy. Poor Robert Frost! Not much of a thinker! ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written five books: ELEMENTS OF GRAMMAR and A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction); A TALE OF UNG, THE ENNUNMENT and GVAGMA (fiction). I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com
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