Taming the stars - Works in Progress
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. The Earth is warmed by the radiation from decaying stardust within. Stars furnish the power on which life depends.
As well as life, stars bring death. Radiation from the Sun causes cancers, and storms that sink ships and flatten homes. Currents stirred by heat within the Earth cause volcanoes and earthquakes. Solar storms could destroy our electrical grids or satellites. Collapsed stars, like the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way, eat other stars.
Unless one day we learn to control and transform them entirely, we must live with stars as best we can. Billions of years from now, the Sun’s increasing temperature will render the Earth barren, before it goes dark altogether. 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. Stasis is not an option. We must progress, or die.
Since the dawn of the species, we have learned to harness ever more energy per person. 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. In time, we learned to tap that energy in other forms. To keep warm, we burned sunlight stored as wood, and learned to use it to cook. We tamed animals to carry us and to help us grow food. Sunshine caused water to evaporate from the oceans and then fall as rain, which we used to drive mills and then generators.
