Human beings don't directly photosynthesize for clear reasons. Solar power isn't available constantly and is too diffuse to power us in real-time. Instead, we eat plants (or animals, which is just another layer of indirection) that have photosynthesized over time and stored up that energy - we then convert that energy so we can metabolize it as needed.
The same thing is happening with petroleum. It's denser and more flexible than the sun. These are real constraints that have led us to use these sources of energy and prioritize them. They're not insurmountable - I think as prices fall we'll see more research into storage, I believe panel efficiency is going up - but the path of least resistance is a powerful force.
I've always wondered why humans did not evolve to photosynthesize, and am interested if they could be permitted to evolve to using CRISPR.
That's my opinion
That's easy to solve. We just start growing leaves.
Likewise, for the past century or more, fossil fuels were the cheapest source of concentrated energy by far. That's about to stop.
But really, the growth of the South during the first half of the 19th century was largely due to immigration patterns. The plantation owner class was largely already-wealthy men from the British merchant class. Due to British class structure, they could never equal even the poorest, lowliest members of the aristocracy, despite their obvious superiority. Moving to America gave them a chance to treat business acumen and wealth itself as an elite class. Next down the list were the scots-irish indentured servants, mostly rebels and criminals and their families. England could either hang them, or sell them to the plantation owners to work off their fines and immigration costs. They provided supervision over the slaves. The slaves were brought over to meet growing labor demand. So it wasn't so much new tech as the colonization and working of large tracts of previously wild land. (Remember, slaves were brought from Africa around the same time to work the sugar plantations of the Caribbean as well - the economics were compelling)
At the radius from the sun that our planet is, there is an upper limit to solar energy of about 4/3 Watts/(M^2) (projected across the curve of the earth during daylight... through atmosphere...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...
The most effective way of collecting sunlight is to use curved reflective surfaces and concentrate it on to points that generate useful work either from the heat or from the photon intensity.
Interestingly, such mirrors also offer anime/bond villain/scifi style focused energy delivery 'weapons'; which is why I am most surprised that the US space programs haven't put any in to higher orbit above the majority of the garbage floating about the earth.
It might also be possible to use the delivered energy from such a system to incite deceleration of existing orbital junk and force burn-up/re-entry.
I'd like to see the time when energy will lack.
Sometimes I wonder how we could rebootstrap technology in a frugal manner. Have shelter, a bit of comfort, a predictable enough supply not to worry too much.
[1] just the other day I put a gif on imgur, 1Million views, a few TB of bandwidth.. I felt bad. So much for this. And that's not the most viewed, nor the longest. Imagine how much is used everyday.
(Ignoring that servers being busier without a good caching infrastructure tends to ramp up resource usage and pull more power)
Umm, exactly how big was that gif? One of those numbers doesn't match up with the other...
Name: unknown Views: 1,773,652 Submitted: 2 months ago Bandwidth: 94.01 TB
Solar Energy is unlimited, cheap and clean. My guess would be that energy will eventually end up being near free.