the sun

by emily
(leeds)

the sun is the main cause of global warming because every 100 years the sun moves closer to the earth heating up our atmosphere even more and in 5,000,000,000 years the sun will explode and destroy the part of the universe that we call home

Barry's Response - Thank you Emily, for the insight and cute drawing. For more about the Milankovitch cycles, in which the earth's proximity and orientation to the sun change by regular patterns, see this article I've written.

Here are some odds'n ends:

The sun is already 4,500,000,000 years old. I guess it's having a mid-life crisis soon. The sun is the closest star, whose light only takes 8 minutes to get here, a short trip of 150 million kilometres. The light from the next closest star takes over 4 years. We constantly collect 94 billion megawatts from the sun. That's a lotta solar power. If it could die today, it would take 50 million years for us to notice.

As far as the billions of stars out there go, ours is less-than-average. Astronomers have found some thousands of times bigger and brighter than the sun.

By comparison, the earth is insignificant. Less than 1% of the diameter of the sun, and three millionths of the sun's mass. It makes you wonder why we're so gung-ho on preserving it in the first place.

Well it's all we have. It's small but it works. I think I'll stay here.

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