8.31 Minutes

Once upon a time, 13.73 billion years ago, a universe was born. It grew to contain 100 billion galaxies. Those galaxies varied in size from dwarfs with as “few” as ten million stars to giants with one trillion (short scale). In the galaxy in which our story takes place, there are 200 to 400 billion stars. The particular star that we are interested in, our sun, was born 4.57 billion years ago and it is 109 earth diameters in size; 1,300,000 earths in mass. Each second, more than 4 million tonnes of matter are converted to energy within the sun’s core. It takes 8.31 minutes for light from that sun to reach our earth. Sunlight supplies about 1,000 watts per directly exposed square meter in clear conditions when the sun is near the zenith. There, via photosynthesis, plants convert about 100 terawatts of sunlight to organic compounds per year via the insanely complicated Calvin cycle. Efficiency is only about 3-6% (varies from 0.1% to 8%). All nutritional energy (energy used to run our bodies) comes from the sun via the photosynthesis of plants. Most of ours is gotten through the insanely complicated Krebs cycle (citric acid cycle) from which we generate ATP (adenosine triphosphate). We use huge amounts of ATP — its use in metabolism converts it back into its precursors. ATP is therefore continuously recycled in organisms, with the human body turning over its own weight in ATP each day. Each ATP molecule is recycled 1000 to 1500 times during a single day (100 / 0.1 = 1000).

I sit here moving my fingers on the computer keys, burning up the ATP. I am an inferno. A tiny child of the sun.

– pre-dawn, looking out the window downstairs. The little white dots are condensed moisture on the screen

As an aside, I can’t help noticing that sunlight takes 8.31 minutes to get to earth, and the bananas that Felix refused 63 times weighed 7.138 kg. See that? 831 >> 138. I think he should have taken the bananas.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/