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A comment on 4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.

Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by rpozarickij on Thursday July 10, 2025 @04:53AM (#44518827)
> Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.

It's interesting to realize that the vast majority of the energy used by humans comes from the sun (with the exception of nuclear and geothermal energy). Even hydro power comes from the sun, because the sun evaporates the water which then becomes part of rivers or other water reservoirs that power hydroelectric generators.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by loudmax on Thursday July 10, 2025 @07:34AM (#44519822)
At some level all fossil fuels come from the sun. Fossil fuels come from biomass accumulated over millions of years. The energy that went into gathering all that carbon and hydrocarbons came from the sun.

Take it a step further and nearly all our energy comes from nuclear fusion, with the exceptions you noted.

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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by myself248 on Thursday July 10, 2025 @08:14AM (#44520124)
I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people:

I use a gravitationally-confined fusion reactor, and pull power out of it by allowing the radiation to excite unbound electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor substrate. It's dangerous; even miles away from the reactor itself I can't expose myself to the radiation for too long or I get a painful skin reaction, and that might lead to cancer someday, but hey, it's cheap and quiet and I don't pay for the nuclear fuel!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by kibwen on Thursday July 10, 2025 @11:48AM (#44522323)
> I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people

Solar is actually fusion power, which is way cooler than any fission plant that puny humans have ever constructed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by card_zero on Thursday July 10, 2025 @05:03AM (#44518901)
Tidal power doesn't come from the sun either. It slows the earth's rotation by a tiny amount.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by OtherShrezzing on Thursday July 10, 2025 @05:44AM (#44519146)
Is the origin of that rotation not also the gravitational wells created by the Sun?
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by HappMacDonald on Thursday July 10, 2025 @06:34AM (#44519421)
IIUC it's only half from the Sun's gravity well, the other half of that energy gradient is from the Moon's gravity well.

Also IIUC "energy from the sun" is really shorthand for "Energy emitted by solar fusion", which tidal would not involve.

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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by Smithalicious on Thursday July 10, 2025 @07:15AM (#44519687)
The laws of gravity are entirely symmetric, so it doesn't seem fair to attribute it specifically to the sun; also, the energy in this case is coming out of the "v" in earth's good old 0.5mv^2 kinetic energy relative to the sun.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by card_zero on Thursday July 10, 2025 @03:06PM (#44524395)
Good pedantry, but then we can argue that the origin of fossil fuels is geothermal (if we ascribe the origin of life to hydrothermal vents).
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by lordofgibbons on Thursday July 10, 2025 @04:59AM (#44518876)
All fossil fuels also come from the sun!
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by Sharlin on Thursday July 10, 2025 @07:19AM (#44519730)
I wonder if there are some minimal fossil hydrocarbon deposits somewhere that originate from chemosynthesis-only microbe populations.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by vrx-meta on Thursday July 10, 2025 @05:33AM (#44519066)
The nuclear fuels are also probably from the Sun. Pretty much everything is the Sun.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by isolli on Thursday July 10, 2025 @05:39AM (#44519102)
Hm, no, don't the heavy elements used for nuclear fission come from a previous generation of stars?
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by ses1984 on Thursday July 10, 2025 @05:36AM (#44519086)
They came from some other suns, technically.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by baxtr on Thursday July 10, 2025 @05:36AM (#44519084)
No wonder people worshipped the Sun in ancient times!
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by thijson on Thursday July 10, 2025 @08:45AM (#44520384)
Nuclear comes from the supernova that created all the heavy elements in our solar system. Fission is releasing energy trapped during that event. So from that standpoint, even Nuclear is solar in origin.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by ertgbnm on Thursday July 10, 2025 @08:58AM (#44520509)
Well the sun didn't make those elements. Some other star did so they aren't solar. Also by that logic everything that is not a hydrogen atom would be "solar" so I don't think we can stretch the analogy.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by pikminguy on Thursday July 10, 2025 @09:22AM (#44520741)
Helium and Lithium were also created in the pre stellar era of the universe, hydrogen was the majority by far but not the only element that wasn't created in stars. I think anything past 3 on the periodic table is exclusively stellar though.
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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by babymetal on Thursday July 10, 2025 @11:55AM (#44522406)
I clicked to the comments to see how far down this observation would appear. It was my first thought, although I can understand why the more energetic discussion is around human-centered energy collection and management.
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