The Star That Controls Our Lives

Do you know the name of the star that keeps you alive? Without this star you could not wiggle a little finger, walk one step, or read this print.

You can feel the effects of this star in your life this very moment. Simply place your hand on the side of your face. The warmth of your body, the warmth of your blood is a gift to you from our nearest star, the day-time star we call the sun.

Air is said to be "the breath of life" but it is the sun that gives us the energy to inhale deeply, and let the air enter our lungs like a rhapsody.

The majority of ancient peoples worshiped the sun because they were aware of a fact that often escapes people today. ALL OUR PHYSICAL LIFE DEPENDS ON THE SUN. Hence, so these people thought, the sun must be something wonderful, great, even divine.

The sun-bright fact is you and I are solar-powered, internal engines! Three times per day (or more) we stoke our internal engines with energy from the sun. We eat sunlight!

Spicy tomato ketchup, sugary-sweet strawberry malts, the avocado flanking your sauteed salmon steak all are gifts from the sun. Without ole sol, not a solitary radish would break terra firma and reach for the sky. Each lemon, each honeydew melon is a fresh gift to you from the sun. Every chicken in the pot, every pot roast in the oven, was put there by the sun. If the sun were to go out of business tomorrow, we would have to go space-hunting for another planet on which to grow sweet corn and squash.

Without the sun, planet earth would be naked as a billiard ball not a stitch of grass to cover the ground; and we likewise would be bare, for our suits are either stolen from cotton fields, or lifted off the backs of sheep, who, in turn, munch green grass to make white wool.

Someone has said a farmer is a "handy man with a sense of humus." But humus would be just that until the sun gives forth with magic, making each green leaf and blossoming bud a private miracle.

Of all things on planet earth, only plants can capture the energy from the sun and give it to us in the form we need to keep alive. Green plants are engaged in the most important manufacturing process in the world making food.

The plant material that holds the key to this mysterious food-making process is chlorophyll, a green coloring matter, which in the presence of sunlight manufactures food.

The process of manufacturing food with the energy from the sun is called photosynthesis. "Photo" is a Greek word meaning light. "Synthesis" means to put together or build. Photosynthesis is building with sunlight.

When the golden rays of the sun shake hands with the green pigment-chlorophyll in a leaf, magic is in the making. The plant is packaging sunlight!

Man rules the seven seas. He builds a Boeing 747 that leaps from San Francisco to New Zealand in a handful of fast hours. He builds a Saturn 5 rocket to bring Apollo astronauts to the moon. He launches the Pioneer 11 spacecraft past the mighty planet Jupiter. Yet, man cannot make a radish!

The little blade of green, however, can do just that. A green leaf has more mystic secrets in its fragile design than all the elves of Ireland that haunt the Lakes of Killarney, or the trolls of Iceland that dwell in the high places east of Reykjavik.

Though delicate as an orchid and lovely as a lily, the blade of green guards its secret with a strength that laughs at the vaunted intelligence of the A-bomb experts. Its secret evades the calculations of slide rule artists and escapes the jaws of calipers.

Magic! Here is tantalizing mystery that even Sherlock Holmes couldn't solve. With the searching eye of the microscope and the sleuthing of chemical analysis, scientists have not been able to pry open the secret of the blade of green, to learn its formula, to find out how the energy of sunlight is stored in the sugar which is made there.

Each year the amount of the sun's energy fixed in this fashion amounts to the equivalent of 300 million tons of coal. We know of no other practical process which can fix the sun's energy in chemical compounds.

In the last analysis, the reason you can walk, talk, and sing is that the sun reaches out through 93 million miles of space to catch you in its warm embrace, and kiss you with its life-giving powers not directly, but in the magic of its masquerade in green.

Most of us are so accustomed to having the sun deposit a fresh day at our doorstep, we take the whole process for granted. We never stop to realize that the nearest star over our heads is giving us this day our daily bread, enriched with energy from on high! Wonder bread that builds strong bodies 12 different ways is truly wonderful. It is packed with captured sunlight, energy from a star!

The Indians of the Southwest are well aware of their dependence on the sun. A Navajo will feel perfectly at home shopping in Flagstaff or Winslow, and will barely turn his head when a Boeing 747 cruises through the sky, but when he builds his hogan, the opening will always face the rising sun, for such is the way, and the thoughts of his people. It is the sun that fills the pods of the mesquite trees with rich and nutritive beans.

Do you know that this very moment you may be carrying "some of the sun in your pocket"? If you happen to have a big, kitchen-size match with a wooden stem, and if you carry this in your pocket, you are carrying "energy from a star!"

To prove it, strike the match, and notice the cosmic magic. You are feeling heat from the sun!

When the matchstick was part of a growing tree, green leaves on the branches of the tree captured energy from the sun and stored it in the wood.

When the matchstick burns, it releases heat from the sun that was captured by green leaves many long years ago, and stored as potential energy waiting for the magic moment when you would release this "sun energy."

Coal, oil, and gas are like the match. They all contain energy captured from the sun.

When ancient swamps and forests were covered over with deep layers of earth, the trees and plants buried under the ground were turned to coal.

Oil and gas are the remains of sea animals that once lived in ancient oceans and got their energy from plants and sea-weeds, which, in turn, took in energy from the sun. When deep layers of earth covered over these ancient sea animals, the pressure of the earth turned their remains into oil and gas. Thus coal, oil, and gas are gifts from the sun.