sun and dirt
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Here's something to think about. Almost all the energy on Earth comes from the Sun, except for the geothermal stuff. The Sun, for what it's worth, is a gigantic burning ball of gas, that is unfathomably big and powerful. The explosive output of the Sun is 100 billion tons of dynamite a second. To put that in perspective, the biggest man-made explosion on Earth, the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb, was the equivalent of 50 million tons. The eruption of Krakatoa, which had a gigantic global impact in terms of weather and climate for years afterwards, was about the equivalent of 200 million tons. That looks pretty unsensationalistic, but check it:
100 000 000 000 = Sun's output
lolo200 000 000 = Krakatoa
lolol50 000 000 = Tsar Bomb
And this is every second. For every second of every day you have lived, you have ever lived, for all of your family to have lived, for all of human history since the very beginning when we were in huts picking berries or even before that to occur 9140 times over, there has been an explosion that is 500 times as powerful as the biggest explosion known to man thus far on Earth.
I personally cannot fathom this, this is crazy for me. But it gets crazier.
I said before how the bulk of the energy on Earth comes from this gigantic explosion 150 million miles away from us. Following this train of thought, every action you have ever taken has been powered by this explosion. When you scratch your head, furrow your brow, eat a piece of celery, when your heart beats, when a bird sings, when you stress over whether or not she likes you, you're doing it because of an explosion. It's happening because of the unreal series of explosions I detailed before. Just by existing, we are harnessing the power four thousand nuclear explosions. Not just four thousand nuclear explosions, four thousand of the biggest nuclear explosions. Just by pulling my hair when I try to grasp this concept, I am harnessing it.
And it really freaks me out when I realize how we are able to do this.
Once upon a time, an organism was created from this insane amount of energy, and this organism mutated, like the X-men, in such a way as to harness this energy, to eat pure energy, and convert it into mass, into something solid and whole and material. And now, 3.7 billion years later, 3.7 billion rotations around a constant intense explosion, we eat plants. Plants, somehow, managed to evolve into objects that take energy and make it into something real. And they began this whole fad of life beyond a microscopic level. And we are also made out of this energy, we eat the plants, or things that eat the plants, or the excretions of things that eat the plants, and we take this energy and we also make it into something real.
And this is happening all around us: the plant on the windowsill is absorbing the biggest explosion in billions and billions of kilometres, the music we listen to is a byproduct of this intense output of energy, fucking kittens are made out of the Sun.
I don't know, my mind is too blown to continue like this for now.
I'm sorry.
I'm gonna go calm down a bit.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment