Think of how far the Earth is from the Sun...

[cthulu2016]

It takes light eight minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth. That is a tremendous distance.

Now imagine the Earth's orbit as a circle (It is an ellipse, but imagine a circle that big.)

The Earth is a speck on that gigantic circle. (A circle 16 light minutes across!)

Now imagine the sphere with that circle as a circumference.



Now think of being outside at noon on a cloudless day on the equator. Feel the sun beating down on the top of your head.

That same amount of light and heat is hitting every point on that sphere.

[jollyreaper2112]

1. and?

Where are you going with this?

[CJCRANE]

2. Solar energy probably.

But just think...even when you're sitting still, you're spinning round at 1000 miles per hour and flying through space at 67,000 miles per hour.

[Yavin4]

3. It's not 4:20 yet n/t

[11 Bravo]

4. If my math is right, that's a surface area of about 108 quadrillion 631 trillion square miles.

(or 108,631,000,000,000,000)

[Brother Buzz]

5. I Like Pie. You Like Pie Too?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

6. only on Pi days like today.

[DreamGypsy]

7. Yup. Fusing 600 million tons of hydrogen into 596 million tons of helium...

...converts ~4 million tons into energy (gamma rays)...every second.



The gamma rays collide with atoms and the energy eventually (between 17,000 and 60 million years later) escapes the surface of the sun as electromagnetic radiation (mostly 'visible' light).

Hot stuff!

[Mnemosyne]

8. And this chart proves the hate mailbag guy's "global warming is caused by the sun" is true!