Does all our energy on Earth come from the sun?
Like fossil fuels come from organic matter that grew because of the sun. Is there any form of energy on that cannot be traced back to the sun in some way?
Geothermal, which at this point in geological history mostly comes from decaying radioactive elements. It's of minor industrial importance, but it fuels undersea vent ecosystems, and does see some use in traditional cultures.
Speaking of radioactive elements, our nuclear generators all run on energy trapped from ancient cosmic catastrophes. Probably colliding neutron stars, for the most part. Hydrogen fusion has been made to happen for research and in atomic bombs - although interestingly we can't use the same kind as the sun does.
Tidal energy is used for some power generation, and it comes from the kinetic energy left in the Moon, and to a lesser degree the Earth itself, from the formation of the solar system.
kinetic energy left in the moon
Does that mean that one day the moon will stop revolving and we will be tidal locked? If so, does that theoretically happen before the sun consumes us?
It gets both slower and further away (to stay in orbit) every year, by like 2 cm IIRC.
If you could go back a couple billion years it would be huge in the sky. There was even a period, called the Jatulian, where you might not have asphyxiated in the early atmosphere. There wouldn't be much else to look at, though, and just your skin germs would be futuristic enough to completely change the course of life on Earth, once they get into the environment.
Do you have any source for the radioactive decay part? I always thought the Earth was hot inside simply because it hasn't finished cooking down from when it formed as a ball of molten stuff. Like a hot potato.
Uh, I'll find one, and edit. It confused the shit out of Victorian scientists, because they had a good guess how old the Earth is from biology, and had thermodynamics, but it was telling them volcanism shouldn't still be happening.
Edit:
Wikipedia mentions it in the geothermal article, but the source is a textbook, and who has time and/or money for that? There's also the article on the age of the Earth. Ah, here we go, in the article on Earth's internal heat budget. Somebody also linked a paper on it elsewhere in this thread.
These give slightly different numbers from each other, but the gist is that radioisotopes (Uranium, Thorium and Potassium being the primordial ones) account for at least half.
Nuclear (fission) energy did not originate in our sun, it originated in some other sun a long time ago, or potentially a neutron star merger.
Tidal energy originates from gravitational collapse and the conservation of angular momentum when our planet and moon formed, and does not rely on our sun, but similarly originated in the dust clouds that formed our solar system which were put there by some other sun.
Geothermal is a hybrid of these two, with some combination of nuclear decay heating and gravity-driven heating.
Hydrocarbon, wind and hydroelectric all heavily involve our sun somewhere in the process though.
Tides are from the pull of the moon's gravity. And the moon formed from another body colliding with the Earth. It's not just due to angular momentum and the moon forming out of cosmic dust like the Earth did.
Without angular momentum it would have fallen back down to the Earth instead of going into orbit. It's the orbit specifically that powers the tides, not just it being there.
But yeah, you're right. Beyond providing the materials dust was not involved.
Tides don’t rely on the sun but are affected by the sun.
They said “tidal forces,” not “tides.” Tidal forces refer to the differential of gravitation between two points on an object. It applies in any situation where gravity is a factor, although typically only very large massive objects experience noticeable effects. That said, the concept of spaghettification (objects being stretched out as they approach a black hole’s event horizon) is based on the fact that tidal forces near a black hole would be so enormous they would be observable for even small objects like people.
Hm. Touche.
Everyone is giving you some great answers, but there are since more subtle ones worth mentioning too.
When you take a picture of space, the light from those other stars hits the camera sensor and induces a tiny electrical charge, which is captured, amplified, and analyzed to create the image. Your eyes actually work that way too.
It's not an energy source as you typically think of it; it never powers anything, but technically it is* energy that exists on Earth that didn't come from our sun.
That’s awesome. Now that you mention it I remember reading that supermassive black holes are a source of cosmic radiation too.
If it doesn't have to be energy that's used as such, there's more answers.
Neutrinos stream through us each moment at a flux pretty similar to sunlight. Day and night; they sail right through the Earth for the most part. Most of it is from the sun's core (directly), but some of it is from distant cosmic monsters like supernovae and jets whipping around black holes, and some of it escapes from nuclear reactions on Earth, in particle accelerators and nuclear generators or from decays in nature.
Gravitational waves from distant black hole mergers have been detected on Earth, and they do carry energy.
Meteors hit the Earth, and sometimes they carry enough energy with them to cause damage, like in Chelyabinsk.
You mentioned cosmic rays. The most energetic ones far exceed the energy of anything our accelerators produce, and it's still a mystery where those unusually powerful ones come from.
Stars give out a lot of electromagnetic energy in the form of radio, microwave, infrared, ultraviolet and x-rays as well as visible light, and probably gamma rays too, although I haven't heard anything about that one. Many frequencies of light are heavily or even fully absorbed by the upper atmosphere of Earth, which is part of what makes space telescopes necessary.
Lighting strikes on Jupiter are very noticeable as noise on some radio bands. I'm not actually sure how much of the wind that powers that is the Jupiter equivalent of geothermal, and how much is ultimately from sunlight. I'm guessing it skews to the latter, though.
Tidal.
Gravitational interaction between the Moon and Earth orbiting each other and the Sun ...
Moon/Earth were formed within the influence of the Sun and the solar system.
Unless a giant comet ( attracted by Sun's larger gravity well?? ) introduced something extra-solar , almost everything is under the influence of the Sun.
Geothermal comes from the heat in the core, produced by gravity crushing the particles together during the Earth's formation.
Nuclear energy comes from the fission and fusion of particles here on earth.
Tidal energy comes from the gravitational pull of the moon.
Hydro comes from the movement of water (though you could trace this back to the sun causing the water cycle).
Earth wouldn't coalesce without the sun. Thus no geothermal.
Nuclear materials were formed in supernovas. Can't have that without a star.
Moons tides wouldn't exist if Earth didn't have an orbit of its own. Again, sun needed.
Hydro you already figured out.
Where did the Sun's energy come from?
The gravitational collapse of a cloud of mostly hydrogen in the vacuum of space.
And anything falling together under gravity was given that kinetic energy from somewhere and ultimately it can all be traced back to the Big Bang.
As for where that energy came from, it's possible we'll never know. Most organised religions (and no doubt a few disorganised ones) have their theories, of course. You may subscribe to one of these.
This is the principle most commonly simplified as "what goes up, must come down"
What's really interesting is that "what goes up, must come down" doesn't hold at the scale of the universe. A naive thinker might imagine big bangs happen in cycles, but in fact this doesn't appear to be the case, because space itself is expanding faster than galaxies are falling back together. And it's not just faster now, but it's accelerating! At some point, space will be expanding faster than the speed of light, and because of that, the entire universe will disappear from our view.
Despite that, the Milky Way galaxy is still close enough to the Andromeda galaxy that they'll collide in about 5 billion years, so don't worry, there's still interesting things to come! If you want to see it, though, you'll need to be somewhere other than Earth, because by that time the Sun will have advanced in its life cycle enough to render Earth completely uninhabitable by all known forms of life.
Brane cosmology suggests the collision of two branes can result in a big bang event, but yes, that is beyond an event horizon.
No, geothermal energy comes from the earth core for example.
https://youtu.be/N1pIYI5JQLE?si=uciOf3JzwF8S6qDy
Y'all need to pay attention to the actual question being asked. Geothermal, nuclear, tidal are all originating with the formation of the galaxy and the formation of stars.
Ask yourself: WHERE did the earth get X,Y,Z? Where does nuclear materials come from: supernovas. How do planets form? A gas cloud coalesces, the star forms, and the remaining gasses coalesce in that gravity well formed by the star. Without a star forming in the middle, you get no solar system. You get cold blob of gas or a cold dead rock. Where does tidal come from: same gravitational interactions that require a sun sized object - tides aren't 100% earth & moon.
Stars are like the seed needed to form crystals. Without them, nothing else forms. Just a bunch of basic chemicals floating around.
OP said the sun, indicating they meant our sun. Other commenters have clarified that fissile material (and a shit-ton of the other stuff further down the periodic table) didn’t come from our sun, but other suns.
I mean ya okay I see that. But still very neat that all energy in every form we have can be traced back to a star if not our own star. That’s so interesting! Let’s get started on the Dyson sphere.
That video was above my pay grade I think. But ya I like what you’re saying here. Sounds like all of our energy does come from a star if not our own star
It'd be interesting to think of novel ways of getting power from sources other than the Sun.
Theoretically, one could, say, build a space-elevator-like device and use the centrifugal force pushing it away from Earth to run a generator. Of course, for that to work, the weight would have to continually receed from Earth, and may require continually replacing the weight. Ultimately that would rob the Earth of angular momentum.
That feels like a perpetual motion machine, because the Earth coming together in the first place released energy. I'm guessing it would take more energy to get the weight to geostationary orbit than you could get back.
Maybe it would work if you lowered an asteroid down, instead. And then you could mine it on arrival.
Edit: Nope, it maths. I think it's down to angular momentum being kind of separate from the gravity well.
So, first off, I'm definitely not arguing this would be a feasible way to get energy in a practical sense in the real world.
But, it wouldn't be a perpetual motion machine. It'd produce less and less energy as the Earth ran out of angular momentum, ultimately approaching zero.
I don't think I'll do the monster math on this, but my gut tells me one could technically and theoretically (not so much in practice) get more energy out of that than it took to get the weight up there. (It might be that the Moon would limit how much energy could be got out of this scheme as well, but I think even with the Moon involved, I think it could still be a net energy gain.) That said, without running the numbers, you might well be right!
Wouldn't that technically be from the sun, too, though? Since the earth orbits the sun due to its mass/gravitational pull?
What I posted would take energy from the angular momentum of the Earth rotating on its own axis, not the (angular?) momentum of the Earth revolving around the Sun.
Honestly, I'm not 100% sure the right way to talk about where the Earth's angular momentum about its own axis came from. I want to say gravity while the Earth coalesced from dust/gas, but I'm not sure that's quite true because I think the gravity would only kindof "concentrate" the angular momentum that was already present in the gas/dust that was already present in the cloud. (Like, when an ice skater pulls their arms toward their body and speed up, that doesn't add energy or momentum to the system that is the ice skater.)
So, maybe it's more accurate to say it's kinetic energy from the Big Bang and/or supernova(s?) that produced the gas/dust that eventually formed the Earth?
But I'm pretty sure this scheme would get energy from a source that wasn't ultimately from the Sun.
The heat in the Earth's mantle and core comes from the gravitational potential energy of the original stellar dust clouds the Earth originally accreted from. So, geothermal energy mostly isn't. And there's also evidence that a few natural uranium deposits have undergone natural nuclear fission chain reactions. That one's a pretty negligible amount, though. Other than that, no, it all traces back to the sun.
Earth wouldn't have coalesced without the sun in the middle. Otherwise we'd still be a gas blob.
Nuclear materials were formed in supernovas. They wouldn't exist in the first place without a star.
Nuclear materials were formed in supernovas. They wouldn't exist in the first place without a star.
Well, yeah, sure. But that star is not the Sun.
Earth wouldn't have coalesced without the sun in the middle. Otherwise we'd still be a gas blob.
I mean, sure? It wouldn't be a gas blob, but it would be a very different system. But that still has nothing to do with it -- even if the gravity of the sun influences how the earth coalesces, it's still not where the thermal energy of the core came from. That came from the potential of the dust itself.
Fishy-breath Mantis
Would hydro and geothermal count? Wouldn't count wind because wind is caused (mostly) by the sun heating things up.
I wouldn't count either then. Hydro is ultimately powered by precipitation, which is caused by the sun evaporating water. Geothermal is ultimately caused by the gravity of the sun affecting the earth.
I agree with hydro, but you're wrong about geothermal. Tidal forces caused by the Sun are minuscule compared to that of the Moon. Also, Earth still has a decent amount of latent heat caused by its formation.
Geothermal is ultimately caused by the gravity of the sun affecting the earth.
No, that's how it works on the Jovian moons, but Earth's interior is heated by some mix of radioactivity and retained primordial collision heat.
Well there is still nuclear, piezoelectric, and kinetic, at least.
Hydro is also the sun - rain is delivered by (solar) evaporation and wind.
Almost.
Literally every other energy source (edit: aside from tidal and some others that people pointed out) is some form of modified and stored sunlight, in some way or another.
Although geothermal could be because of the rotation of the earth compared to its core along with tidal forces.
Although I’m not sure how much of that is from the sun or just in general.
Not sunlight though. Just the sun’s gravitational affect on the earth as well. But nuclear is definitely extrasolar
It could be, but it's not. A big part is nuclear decay, strangely enough. Some is from primordial heat, and some is from the motion of the core, but mostly from regions rising and falling, not rotation.
There is also kinetic energy when objects in space crash into the earth. RIP 🦖🦕
Hypothetically those would average to O as they strike randomly though right?
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2011/07/17/kamland-geoneutrinos/
A surprising amount of geothermal energy comes from radioactive decay. Gravitational binding energy is indeed very large, but much of that heat has already radiated away before a solid crust formed.
But it sounds like, based on other comments, those things are from stars too, right? Like the sun caused the formation of our planet. It also contributes to tidal forces. And radioactive materials also came from other stars if not our own star. Right?
To add to this most of the suns energy leaves the planet. Very little is retained. What the sun provides is a source of low entropy.