Last week, I talked about how complexity is our true sticking point, not endless energy (from fusion or anywhere else).
WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH COMPLEXITY?
I’m struck by this question whenever I can fortify myself to dip into the news (see my article about outrage addiction). We talk about the energy crisis and oil and gas and fracking. Then we talk about climate change and CO2 emissions. Then we talk about the economy and inflation. Then we talk about a childcare crisis (at least in the US). And then we talk about our crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing debt. And we do this like we are talking about different things.
THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING.
How are they possibly the same thing? Let me explain, and in the process, hopefully, I can pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard behind our economy, and our governments, and our art, children, health, everything on earth, really. His name is Dan. But let’s start at the beginning.
DAN THE HYDROGEN ATOM
Once upon a time, there was a hydrogen atom named Dan who lived in the center of a star in one of the outer arms of a galaxy, in one of the outer spines in a supercluster of galaxies, which is where the address gets fuzzy, but that is surely one of the uncountable superclusters across the universe, but we can’t see that far away.
He is not long for his world, because he and three of his hydrogen friends on this particular day get squished into one helium atom, in what we call nuclear fusion. Except not all of him and his friends fit into one helium atom. There’s a little bit left.
It’s a blindingly small amount of mass. 29% of 4 hydrogen atoms are leftover, which is converted to pure energy. (Remember Einstein: E=MC2 Matter is really dense energy and vice versa?) I don’t think it was ever impressed upon me just how much energy is in one little atom. In this case, the energy released could power a 60 KW light bulb for 100 years.
So the former hydrogen atom, now light and heat and movement (thermal, radiant, and kinetic energy), still named Dan, go flying out across space and unlike so many of his fellows, smacks into a planet. And unlike so many planets, this one has a layer of gas around it which traps him on the planet’s surface, never to leave it again.
THE MAGIC OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS
Dan continues his journey and runs smack dab into a little kale plant, which takes a few molecules of carbon from the water it drinks and another hydrogen molecule from the soil it eats. That hydrogen atom is an old cousin of Dan’s from a very, very long time ago and a galaxy far away, but they don’t really have time to connect because the kale releases the free oxygen into the atmosphere that used to be stuck to the carbon, and uses Dan to bind these three together (energy, hydrogen, and carbon), creating a teeny tiny glucose molecule.
And then a little human girl named Danielle, ironically enough, pulls the kale plant from her garden and reluctantly eats it in a salad her mother makes.
THE MAGIC OF DIGESTION
The glucose molecule containing Dan gets absorbed into Danielle’s intestine and wings around her bloodstream. (We won’t go into what happens to the rest of the kale plant.) That little glucose molecule finally reaches Danielle’s bicep, where in a very complicated reaction involving multiple intermediary steps I won’t go into without completely blowing the word count of this note, the glucose is ripped apart.
Dan is bound up in the cell, and the soil and water Dan rode in on go back into the bloodstream, and the carbon at least goes out of the lungs as carbon dioxide. (Really FASCINATING side note, if Dan had gotten bound up in a fat cell, instead of a muscle cell, he would just sit there for a while until called back into the bloodstream to get used. Which means we lose weight by breathing. Seriously. And literally.)
But Dan ended up in a bicep and Danielle happens to be in the middle of a violin recital by the time this is all over, so very quickly, that muscle gets the message to move it and contract repeatedly as she saws out a passable rendition of twinkle twinkle little star (using a very teeny tiny bit of a star to do it, whom she does not know is named Dan.)
Dan relinquishes his job of holding an ATP molecule together (what became of him when the glucose broke down) in the mitochondria and becomes the heat/movement/kinetic energy again, in this case, to move a violin bow and heat Danielle’s bicep. In short, converting energy to music, which is not an equation you’ll find in your physics textbook, but what else is it made of?!
WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN FROM THERE?
Some of him went off in the auditorium as sound waves. Some as heat released from Danielle’s skin. Some as the movement of air stirred up by the movement of her arm. He dances around the atmosphere with the rest of the solar energy and maybe one day to escape to go flinging into space until he gets suctioned up by a black hole or another bit of gravity to start the dance all over again.
He could eventually find himself back as potential energy again. Remember, energy is not created or destroyed, it just moves around.
The long and short of it is, we are all just dirt and sunshine and ocean.
And every spec of heat, light, movement, and life on earth came from the sun. (With a couple of minor nuclear exceptions.)
How is this useful? (if you’re not creating alien species for a novel or trying to pass a high school biology exam?)
Like it or not, there are a couple of really big collective decisions we need to make as a species (well, ideally about 200 years ago) but soon is the next best option. Losing track of the fact that our entire planet, life, and economy is about sunlight obfuscates those decisions.
The only reason we exist is sunlight and the atmosphere that traps it here. We forget that at our peril.