The Boat--MC
There are two broad ways of looking at the universe and everything within it. One is religious where everything is preordained, deterministic and like clockwork controlled by an entity that various cultures call god. The other is that once the universe came to be—and how and why are vastly complex scientific questions—things happened dynamically without any specifically planned outcome. What we have is fortuitous and serendipitous.
Within that second view is the idea I have long propagated and it is that nothing in the universe or, closer home within our solar system, was aimed at necessarily creating and nurturing life. It just happened over billions of years of chemical reactions between elements along essentially unpredictable paths. In a sense, we are an unplanned baby. So get used to it.
That brings me to our sun which as we all know is the reason why we are here—you and I and this bloody blog. I was reading a fascinating piece on NASA about how the space agency has been measuring “how much sunshine powers our home planet.”
“The Sun’s output energy is not constant. Over the course of about 11 years, our Sun cycles from a relatively quiet state to a peak in intense solar activity — like explosions of light and solar material — called a solar maximum. In subsequent years the Sun returns to a quiet state and the cycle starts over again. The Sun has fewer sunspots — dark areas that are often the source of increased solar activity — and stops producing so many explosions, going through a period called the solar minimum. Over the course of one solar cycle (one 11-year period), the Sun’s emitted energy varies on average at about 0.1 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but the Sun emits a large amount of energy – 1,361 watts per square meter. Even fluctuations at just a tenth of a percent can affect Earth,” NASA says.
“In addition to those 11-year changes, entire solar cycles can vary from decade to decade. Scientists have observed unusually quiet magnetic activity from the Sun for the past two decades with previous satellites. During the last prolonged solar minimum in 2008-2009, our Sun was as quiet it has been observed since 1978. Scientists expect the Sun to enter a solar minimum within the next three years, and TSIS-1 will be primed to take measurements of the next minimum,” it says.
The sun-earth equation is a crucial one for sentient life, particularly from the standpoint of how much energy the former radiates and the latter receives. As the figures suggest, event just a tenth of a percent change in the amount of energy—1,361 watts per square meter—can have remarkable effect on our planet. That is the reason why NASA’s Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), which will precisely measure what scientists call “total solar irradiance”, is so important.
“TSIS-1 will study the total amount of solar radiation emitted by the Sun using the Total Irradiance Monitor, one of two sensors on the instrument. The second sensor, called the Spectral Irradiance Monitor, will measure how the Sun’s energy is distributed over the ultraviolet, visible and infrared regions of light. TSIS-1 spectral irradiance measurements of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation are critical to understanding the ozone layer — Earth's natural sunscreen that protects life from harmful radiation,” NASA says.