Reflecting on the history of harnessing sunlight

With daylight growing ever-shorter, I was gazing out the window at sunset yesterday watching the light fade, when a traffic-jam of sunlight-related thoughts collided in my brain.

The first was the memory of a powerful passage from a novel by Elie Wiesel, in which a man is waiting to execute a political prisoner who has been sentenced to die at sunset. He says you know night has arrived when you’re gazing out a window in the evening and you suddenly realize that you’re looking at your reflection in the darkening glass instead of the landscape outside.

That somber notion jumped into my mind just as I noticed my face blossoming faintly in the glass — but at the same moment my solar lights on the patio outside flickered on, and my mind jumped to a cheerier sunlight-related perspective.

Over the past year, I have removed the electric landscape lights around my patio and replaced them with solar lights, which have improved greatly over the twenty years or so that I have tried to keep lights on around the patio. And as those solar lights flickered on, I marveled at how clever man has become at capturing sunlight and releasing it after the sun has gone down.

But then, isn’t that what man has done even in the age of campfires and fireplaces? After all, a tree is nothing more than sunshine fused into carbon-based wood fiber, thanks to photosynthesis. And a campfire or a fireplace is nothing more than sunshine twisting back out of the wood to release its light and heat back into the world, leaving behind nothing but a tiny scattering of ash once the sunlight and sun-warmth are set fully free once more.

But go back farther still, to the age of coal and oil—the products of ancient trees hundreds of millions of years ago. A coal or oil fire is nothing more than ancient sunshine finding its way back to the air after being sequestered for ages beyond reckoning.

All those thoughts collided in my brain as I watched the light fade on my patio last night as the solar lights flickered on.

For the whole of human history, we have depended on our ability to release the power of the sun and to turn it back into light and heat. Our very survival has depended upon it, and mankind has benefitted from our mastery of it, as documented by the explosion in human population as man learned to create and harness fire as a regular tool in his kit, rather than just a happy accident of lightning.

But the whole time, regardless of how he created it, man was simply unleashing the sun made captive in coal, oil, peat, or wood.

But yesterday evening, as I gazed out the window right at sunset and watched my solar lights blink on, I watched sunlight released back into the world that had been captured not ages ago, but only hours and minutes beforehand. I didn’t have to wait for wood-and-peat centuries, or oil-and-coal millennia, to see faded sunlight reclaimed.

And it occurred to me that we live in a pivotal time, perhaps unmatched by any other time in human history.

If you want to see what I’m talking about, take a drive past Huntley High school and gaze upon the vast spread of solar panels stretching between the school and the corn field just to the east. Those panels weren’t there just a couple years ago. It is like that in schools, parks, and compounds all across America.

Millions of Americans now drive electric cars, and although the electricity powering those cars still comes mainly from oil-or-coal generated power, how long will it be before the grid is powered mainly by the day’s sunlight alone?

Man’s heat and light have always come from the sun, but until now it has always been sunlight invested and deposited into an account that took hundreds or millions of years to provide dividends.

But all that is changing, and we are that group of humans right here on the cusp of that change at this moment in history.

Future millennia of humans will wonder what it felt like to be right there at that moment of change. Just as we might want to talk to humans who newly discovered fire or the wheel, future humans will want to travel back in time to talk to us, to see how astounded we are at our good fortune.

Just in case our inheritors someday invent a time machine, take the time to be ready to give them a good interview when they come back to talk to you next week or in a year or so.

Watch the sun go down.

See your face appear in the darkening glass.

And when your solar lights blink on, feel the wonder of it all.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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