9: The Sun and the Earth

Modern people cherish the Sun. On the few days when the Sun appears in Seattle, everyone—and I mean everyone—goes outside and occupies a patch of grass, a park bench, or any other sunny spot they can find. (You know it’s true, Seattleites.) And surely, you can make a case that Southern Californians worship the Sun, what with their devotion to sunglasses, suntans, sunroofs, and sunny dispositions. College football teams (e.g., Arizona Sun Devils), brands of food (e.g., Sun Chips), and the most sacred day of the week—Sunday—are all named after the Sun. Even the cars we drive—the Solstice, Equinox, Eclipse, and Solara—refer to the Sun.

Our solar devotion has deep historical roots. Consider:

• The Polynesian word Maui refers to a god who captured the Sun for their people at Haleakala Crater on Maui, Hawaii, one of the best places in the world to view a sunrise (Westervelt 1910; Andersen 1995).
• The Incans and Aztecs worshiped the Sun, as evidenced in the temples at Qorikancha and Machu Picchu in Peru and the Pyramid of the Sun in the ancient city of Teotihuácan near Mexico City (e.g., Cowgill 2015).
• The Ise Grand Shrine complex in Ise, Japan, including Naikū and 91 nearby Shinto shrines devoted to Amaterasu-ōmikami, the goddess of the Sun, has existed since 4 BCE (e.g., Akima 1993).
• The Konark Sun Temple in Konark, India, built in the 13th century in honor of the sun god Surya, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year (Behera 2005).
• A 68-foot-tall temple dedicated to Ra in Cairo marks the site of the ancient Egyptian city Heliopsis, the City of the Sun (Dobrowolska and Dobrowolski 2006).
• Stonehenge, now believed to be an ancient burial site, was built in alignment with the positions of the sunrise and sunset on the first day of summer in England (e.g., Pearson et al. 2009).
• At Mesa Verde, the Anasazi built a Sun Temple some 800 years ago, possibly as an astronomical observatory (e.g., Towers 2016).

But we must go deeper than this. Did you know that the Sun drives the motions of the ocean and atmosphere, creates our weather, and drives the production of food, lumber, medicines, and oxygen? Did you realize that every time you drive an internal combustion car, you unleash ancient sunlight, energy from the Sun that fell on Earth millions of years ago (e.g., Hartmann 2004)? Fossil fuels—sunlight captured by ancient plants and algae that were buried and transformed into coal, natural gas, and crude oil—drive the world’s economies. The Sun powers our planet, feeds our hunger, and governs our daily lives. In many ways, our lives revolve around the Sun just as in ancient times.

But our modern relationship with the Sun has a dark side. Human activities have disrupted the natural processes by which the Sun makes Earth habitable for life by maintaining a narrow range of climate-comfortable temperatures. In unleashing ancient sunlight, we’ve unleashed carbon dioxide to our atmosphere—lots of it. As a result, our planet is warming. Human-caused warming has brought extreme weather, sea level rise, and the unraveling of ecosystems. How we deal with these threats in the next couple decades may well determine how and where we live.

If we are to live on this planet for centuries to come, then perhaps we owe it to ourselves and future generations to have a basic grasp of the Sun and how it provides energy to our planet and civilization. Find a sunny place and dive in.