Welcome to You Ask Andy

Macky Sloan, age 15, of Bonham, Texas, for his question:

How much of a friend is the sun?

A burn from too much sun can be very painful. The scorching, long days of summer may become wearisome and the farmers often wish that the sun would stop shining and clouds drift over the sky with rain. But these are very small penalties to pay for all the benefits we get from our friend the sun.

Our planet gives forth no light and no heat of its own. Neither does the moon. Our daylight and our moonlight come from the face of the glorious sun, for the moon shines only with reflected sunlight. Without our friend the sun, ours would be a world of dismal darkness and eternal night.

Sunlight is a phenomenon, an amazing fact we must accept but cannot quite explain. It is a form of energy, ono part of which we know as heat. True, we know how to make fires and furnaces of all kinds. But if all this man‑made heat were toted up, it would be a mere drop in the ocean when compared with the tremendous heat poured down by the sun upon the earth every day. It has been estimated that the sun bathes the earth every second with energy equal to 126 million horsepower. A little more than half of this energy stays in the atmosphere or is reflected back into space.

This energy bathes everything on which the sun shines and even reaches deep into the earth and into the oceans. Living things were created under the radiant sunshine of ancient days and they used that energy to survive. Living things still need the energy of the sun to survive. Green plants use this energy in photosynthesis, to make plant food from water and carbon dioxide. In the process they give off oxygen into the air ‑ the very oxygen we need to exist, The animal world depends for survival upon the plant world for oxygen and for food, for the animals which do not feed on plants feed on animals that do.

The sun also provides us with changing weather. Its smiling sunbeams draw up moisture in the form of water vapor. This vapor becomes clouds and falls to water the earth. The sun even creates the breezes which blow the clouds, carrying water from one place to another. For wind is a patch of heavier air moving towards a patch of lighter air. The sun creates the patch of lighter air by warming the ground, the ground warms the air above it and the warm air expands and rises.

True, we can make a fire and burn a light. But what do we use for fuel? Coal, oil and gas are fossil materials ~ the remains of plant and animal life from bygone ages. The energy in these fuels is the energy of the sun, stored in these fossils from ancient days. We make electric. power with coke or with waterfalls. The coke is a form of coal fuel. The waterfall could not exist unless the sun drew up moisture and let it fall as rain to make the tumbling river.

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