Recently, a science fiction movie got me thinking about some interesting ideas in science. One topic that comes up in the movie is the energy of the Sun.
Let's compare some numbers real quick. Your home needs a certain amount of energy to keep everything running, usually in the neighborhood of 10,000 kilowatt hours depending on where you live. A city like Houston has about 500,000 housing units. If you start thinking about human energy demands across the globe, the numbers are staggering. Yet, our Sun makes more energy in a single hour than all of humanity uses in a year. Here's the really big number: 380,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kWh! 😱 (that's 380 sextillion!)
If a rogue space microbe started devouring our Sun, it would have an unreal amount of energy at its disposal. But can our Sun's energy really be stolen away?
First let's consider how the Sun works. It is a massive ball of mostly hydrogen gas, about 1.3 million times bigger than Earth. Towards the center of the Sun, hydrogen atoms are fused into helium atoms due to the star's massive gravity. The fusion process converts matter into lots of energy. We would not exist without this hot, dense, violent reaction.
For an organism to drain the Sun's energy, it would need to tolerate the most extreme environmental conditions. Do we know anything that can do that? There are some tough microbes out there, like bacteria communities near hydrothermal vents. The vent water can reach 400oC, though the bacteria hang out in the cooler pockets of the water. Could they survive the Sun? No way! The surface of the Sun is 5,500oC.
As far as we know, 122oC is the hard limit for even extreme organisms. The molecules that make up cells, like DNA and different proteins, break down and stop working above that temperature. We just don't know of any living things that can get around that hurdle.
What about pulling heat and energy away from a star? Maybe a star could be dimmed by draining the hydrogen fuel that feeds the fusion reaction, but we're starting with the volume of a million Earths. We don't know of any technology that could begin to handle that much hydrogen!
Astrophysicists and sci-fi authors have thought up hypothetical structures that could affect into the Sun's energy output. A Dyson sphere, for example, is a fictional device where a huge sphere of satellites or other devices is built around a star to capture its energy. The ultimate renewable energy source! 😎
Speaking of energy use, here's an eye-opening graph displaying the amount of energy produced in the U.S. in the year 2025.
Here are some questions I think of when I look at this graph:
💡What are the top two energy sources in the United States? How many kilowatt hours of energy were produced in 2025 by each source?
💡The graph uses millions of kilowatt hours. If you converted the Sun's energy in an hour to millions of kilowatt hours, how would it compare to the total energy produced by all sources in the graph?
💡Why would the graph not include the Sun's energy for a year?