WHAT THE SUN CAN DO

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 September 1923, Page 7

WHAT THE SUN CAN DO

STORY OB’ 1 THE FUTURE. > People now living on the earth may see the day when the sun will begin to work for them like a giant ser- : vant doing all the “chores” on a farm 196,940,000 square miles in area. And, if this is accomplished, a vast area of the earth’s surface will change its appearance. The horizon will glisten with forests of glass—towering tubes of glass, great domes of glass, fiat, . roofs of glass, stretching for miles over the plain, huge jars or glass bending over orchards and farms thousands of acres in extent. The glass tubes, domes, jars and roofs will be the machinery science is now trying to invent for controlling the rays of the sun and diverting they to any purpose man wishes. Dr. Giacomo Cliamician, distinguished scientist of Bologna, pictured such a fantastic future for the earth in an address delivered a few years ago before the English International Congress of Applied Chemistry, says a New York paper. He saw the glass forests harnessing solar energy for man. Then his vision was considered all but preposterous. But now from the Smithsonian Institute at Washington and from the New York Agricultural Experiment Station at Genev,, New York, comes hope that Dr. Caiamician’s prediction may be partially fulfilled in this generation. Smithsonian experts it is reported, are on the eve of perfecting a device for generating electricity by catching and utilising the rays that come from the sun. And Dr. R. W. Thatcher, of the Experiment Station at Geneva, announces that he and his colleagues have discovered some of the steps in the process by which a plant cell drinks in the sun’s rays, and have artificially duplicated some of the steps in the plant’s growth. What the results of these discoveries, if they are practically applied, will mean to man can be imagined when the fact is considered that, so far, human civilisation has made use almost exclusively of fossil solar energy. Fossil solar energy, roughly speaking, is a term applied to energy stored up on the earth’s surface by the sun. Coal is fossil solar energy. So are dead leaves. The sun helped to make them and the energy the sun put into them benefits man when be burns coal and dead leaves. How can the sun’s rays be controlled? This, in brief, is the question science has been trying to answer. This is the problem science now hopes it is about to solve. The first step was made by studying plant life to find out exactly how fruits and vegetables grow by drinking in certain chemicals from the air and others from the earth, and still others from water and the sun’s rays, and the carbon dioxide which men and animals give off. Says one authority: “Some time in the future the coal supply of the world will, be exhausted. And the amount of water power is so limited that it is insufficient to provide the entire ■world’s power supply. There is only one source of energy vastly greater than coal and water power, and that is sunlight. There is an unlimited supply there.”