Sunrise

Being out in the sun is good for your health and may protect you against a range of diseases. That’s the insight offered by a spate of new studies (www.odemagazine.com/doc/46/are_you_getting_enough_sun). But is that really so surprising? A much greater shock to me was the idea, circulating for the past 15 years or so, that the sun could threaten your health. I regularly see people in abundantly sunny California hiding from the solar rays as if sunshine were the messenger of death. Of course sunburn is not a good thing, but it doesn’t make sense to me to hide from the source of our very existence. It is a simple as that: no sun, no Earth, no life.

I have a friend, Joel, who—in his own special way—worships the sun. He has a telescope on a rooftop deck with a range of special filters that enable him to look directly at the sun. It’s an amazing experience to see the burning fireball sending flares into the universe. These flares, Joel mentions, are often several times bigger than the diameter of the Earth. Looking through the telescope with Joel—whom we’ve nicknamed “Lord of the Sun”—makes me realize and appreciate the importance of this ultimate source of our lives.

There is no energy source that is not dependent on the sun. However, the best and cleanest source of energy—directly converting sunshine into electricity—still poses economical challenges. The first solar panels were made in the 1970s, but more than 30 years later, solar energy is still significantly more expensive than coal or oil. But that may soon change. Inventor Elliot Berman, who recently showed me the first solar panel he built almost 40 years ago—it is still working perfectly!—has now introduced a new method of tapping solar power (www.odemagazine.com/doc/46/the_second_coming_of_solar_power) that may be economically competitive with other energy sources. And his innovation is not the only one on the horizon. There is a burst of activity in the world of solar energy today, which explains why it is increasingly capturing the imagination of people around the planet.

The trade association for the nuclear energy industry recently asked 1,000 Americans what energy source they thought would be most prevalent for generating electricity in 15 years. Sun was the clear winner, with 27 percent of those polled picking it as the power of the future. Energy experts in government and industry quickly responded that there was no way the sun could become the leading energy source so soon without dramatic technological breakthroughs. Today, they pointed out, the sun provides only 0.01 percent of the electricity supply in the U.S. That response made me think of the famous quote about television in 1946 from the head of the 20th Century Fox movie studio, Darryl F. Zanuck: “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

The powers that be never see change coming. It’s not in their interest. But people’s imaginations are heightened by the prospect of progress. That’s what happened with television. The same for cell phones and the Internet. No expert was able to predict these landslides of change. Affordable solar panels are coming, because in the imagination of the people they are already on many, many roofs. Rest assured that Ode will follow this sunrise closely—it’s our mission—and that I’ll watch it from the roof of the Lord of the Sun.