Re: Can solar energy, power or effect a human being in any way ?

Dear Yankee02,
Yes, solar energy affects every minute of your life! The food you eat is solar energy changed into potential chemical energy by plants. The meat you eat is solar energy changed into animal flesh by the pigs and fish that ate plants that captured the energy from the sun. The coal, natural gas, and petroleum products that heat your home, generate the electricity, and run your vehicles is solar energy captured by ancient plants and converted to potential chemical energy. The plastics so much of your modern world is manufacture from are carbon compounds assembled by plants using solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide you and other animals breathe out. Plants use solar energy to produce the oxygen we animals breathe in. Unless you spend time with thermophilic bacteria living next to volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea, every living thing in your life lives on solar energy captured by plants and bacteria carrying on photosynthesis.

In addition to fueling the biosphere, solar energy drives our weather, both good and bad. Solar energy creates the aurorae and can disrupt communications networks and wreck satellites, as recently happened to the Japanese craft "Hope" en route to Mars. In the summer if your don't use sun block, solar energy can give you a sunburn and, over the years, increase your risk of skin cancer.

Ultraviolet radiation from the sun can cause mutations in plants and animals if our protective layer of ozone is compromised by the chemicals we dump into the air.

We use windmills and solar cells to capture solar energy and change it into kinetic electricity which can injure or kill a person if you ground a wire through your body.

So do pursue your dream of becoming a scientist and remind all your fellow investigators of our "solar connection." The enegry of the sun is just about everywhere in our lives!

Jim Foerch
James C. Veen Observatory
Lowell, Michigan
USA

P.S. Why does a proud citizen of the great nation of Canada have an email handle "Yankee"?