Powered By The Light From Billions Of Stars

I am, and you are too.

There’s no question that this earth is driven by our sun.

All you have to do is stand outside on a clear day and feel the warmth of its rays.

There is, perhaps, a bit more going on, as our sun is but one amongst the billions of billions of stars…

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Our primary influence

And understandably worshiped in early days.

The sun provides heat, light, weather, and the energy to grow – around the world. All of these, and more, more than I could ever list.

The sun’s rays take just over eight minutes to reach the earth, delivering 1.7 x 10¹⁷ Joules of energy, every second of every day – that’s quite a lot!-)

But without the Sun’s gravitational effect to keep us relatively in place, we might just have remained a cold rock slugging through space at thirty kilometers per second (our measly orbital speed)…

Personal

You feel the power of the sun when it shines on your skin.

That light is an electro-magnetic ray whose smallest increment is called the photon. In large numbers, these photons bundle into the rays of sunlight that are absorbed into and warm your skin (with uncomfortable results if you happen to allow too much of this).

Vision occurs when the eye absorbs photons – and pulls the energy of the photons into your body as well.

The strength of the sun keeps us from looking directly at it (we’d damage our eyes if we did that), but sunlight reflects off nearly everything and gives us the wonderful panoramas of the day.

The night sky

The stars at night are different.

Their rays have been traveling huge distances to reach us. We measure that distance in the number of years the light will have traveled – with the closest stars being over four light years away. We’ve detected galaxies billions of light years away!

The light from these “suns” doesn’t hurt our retinas…

Powered

But it certainly enters our bodies.

When you’re out at night do you not see the stars?

Doesn’t that mean that photons of visible light are being absorbed by your eyes?

And didn’t that light come from that distant star?

And even if you can’t make out the individual stars – because the photons are so scattered at this distance or the electromagnetic waves are in lengths outside the visible realm – you recognize that those photons are still striking you, yes?

Tiny

Beyond small – minuscule – that’s the amount of energy you might get from one of these photons.

But I never said anything about strength, and quantity surely makes up for that.

Billions and billions

Carl Sagan insists that he never said it, but it’s fun to think of him doing so – to let us know just how many stars there might be out there.

If we can observe one hundred billion galaxies in our universe, and each galaxy may typically have hundreds of billions of stars, how many would you image exist in all of the universes…

Because that takes me back to:

Powered By The Light From Billions Of Stars, I Am, And You Are Too.

And with all of those different suns feeding us energy, who’s worried about limits?