This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
Ten trillion rocket launches
It’s easy to think in terms of scarcity.
We’re practically programmed for it. But I don’t think we live in a universe that justifies this as a default.
For instance, let’s think about our very own Sun, which is the source of almost all of our energy, including the fossil fuels we’ve been wantonly burning for the last hundred years, and all the food we eat.
But the Sun isn’t a spotlight pointed at our tiny planet, 93 million miles away. It’s a sphere, which means that over a given period of time, it radiates approximately an equal amount of energy in all directions.
To get an idea of how much of the Sun’s total output of energy gets absorbed by our tiny little Earth, so far away, you could imagine a big shell made of Earths. Sort of like a fantastically, unreasonably large Dyson sphere. Together, all these Earths would absorb most of the Sun’s total energy output (about 78.5%, because circles don’t fill squares very well).
How many Earths does it take to make the fantastically, unreasonably large shell around the Sun? Well, unfortunately I’m not good enough at math to get really accurate numbers here, and I tried asking ChatGPT, but it kept spitting out different results when I crosschecked.
But it’s a lot. Like, somewhere in the range of trillions.
What this means, basically, is that the Sun produces trillions and trillions of times more energy than whatever hits our planet.
But wait, slow down. How much energy does our planet get from the Sun?
Hoo boy, let me tell you.
The answer is 1.499×10^22 J, which is just under fifteen sextillion joules.
What’s a sextillion? Well, what you do is you take a trillion (or, one thousand billions), and you multiply it by another billion.
This isn’t working. Let’s try something else.
The energy that Earth receives from the Sun in a single day is roughly 25 times more than the total energy consumed by all humans in an entire year. It’s enough to power New York City for approximately 250 million years.
If you do a unit conversion to turn the Sun’s energy into calories (which is like the whole point of plants), one day of sunshine could feed the entire global population (approximately 8 billion people) for five and half billion years.
Or it could boil the water in eighteen million Olympic-sized swimming pools to steam.
It’s more energy output than 300,000 hurricanes.
Or a hundred million atom bombs.
Or ten trillion rocket launches.
OK, I think that’s enough.
But now we need to circle back real quick to emphasize that those great big numbers do not represent the total output of the Sun’s energy in a single day, just the percentage that hits Earth.
Which is much less than one trillionth (which is one thousandth of a billionth) of what the Sun produces.
What more proof do we need that we live not in a universe of scarcity, but in one of abundance? More life-giving energy than we can even hope to truly comprehend is literally oozing out of our own Sun.
In a galaxy filled with hundreds of billions more just like it. In a universe filled with a thousand billion galaxies.
Click at least one of these or else…
…I can’t guarantee that you won’t be carried into the sea by an army of angry interpretive dance instructors.
Ten trillion rocket launches