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In the past, the sun was worshipped because it bathed the Earth in it's life giving light.

Everyday, consistently, day breaks and the terrors of the night can be forgotten.

Or at least, pushed forward another 12 hours.

People smile, people feel radiant with hope.

Time to hunt, commune, play.

And rightly so as for more than 1 million years, our ancestors had to contend with monsters in the dark whose bottled appetites were sharpened with the fast approaching darkness after dusk.

Snakes, Lions, Tigers, and all sorts of man-eaters hunt at night. And perhaps, prefer it that way.

There is less chance for the pray to run as the prey has such poor eyesight in the dark.

And the horror industry scored before it had even started.

So right after 10,000BC, we got the Egyptians who built entire monolithic pyramids to the Sun.

The tallest, largest and most impressive structures for more than 5000 years.

BTW, they literally invented mathematics too just so that they could build these venerations to Sol.

We later had the Aztecs who built their Pyramids a little more modestly.

And many others so that sun-worship it was all over the world with the Greeks having Helios, The Japanese having Amaterasu, name it. Sol is Spanish.

But that is a time long past.

Sun-worship is now a backwater deal. The religious cannon focus more on morals and ethics now. Not the worship of really powerful objects.

In a way, this is a major improvement as global cooperation is hard when you think your neighbours who don't look like you, are only worthy being blood sacrificed on an altar to their beloved sun-god.

Apocalypto, anyone?

Religion provided the necessary foundations that paved the way to the humanist creed. To the extent that it did. And to me, I do not see any ideal better than humanism. Which at its heart, treasures each and every single one of the human lives that ever get to live on this planet.

But today, we focus more on science. Hence the Parker Solar Probe, the James Webb Telescope, name them.

The search for knowledge is the new religion. The search for more resources and more efficient ways of doing things is the life-force of the global economy.

The customer is always right and the customer has needs that they need to meet. Let's help them meet them as best as we can especially physically.

They should buy things to satisfy their needs. And more things if they are not yet satisfied.

Does the customer want to purchase a lavish and famous lifestyle for cheaper? Let's invent fast fashion. In that way, they can always catch up with the Jonesses and the Kardashians before the day is through.

(Fast fashion was a sticking point. Feel like getting into it. I mean, wouldn't my Sun-Earth Designer Wear be lit?

Well, I also dream).

Anyway, point is, the sun is still the sun. We are still on Earth. And once in a while we send a Parker Solar Probe there or we are like Beyonce and we put on a Solar-Halo crown and collect those dollars from our fans.

Or we do artwork and blogs and wonder if we could ever magically teleport just a piece of that energy to a kitchen in rural Jinja, Uganda, with wet firewood logs that are making so much smoke it could make tear-gas look breathable.

What I wouldn't do for some energy teleportation technology. Some Harry Potter magic.

Ok, enough of the fantasy tales.

Let's wrap up with the sci-fi.

In an outer-space-faring future, be it on another planet or plain old outer-space, humans will still need to be near a sun if they are to live well. Or at all.

It's why I strongly believe we are stuck in this Solar system. For a looooong time if not forever. Call it being a Space Conservative. Get-Out-Of-The-Solar-System types are Space Progressives.

 In this future, I suffice, children still wake up and say "Let's go play with sunlight".

I mean, when they do it now they burn papers and stuff.

They'll still want to burn papers and stuff.

Some of these will wonder if they can cook with this sunlight too and will pursue that unknown end.

Some will wonder how much of a blast they can get out of the biggest magnifying glass ever. These we shall discourage, carefully dissuade and rechannel their ambitions if we have any sense too as adults.

Others will get bored and will go do something realistic and sensible with their time.

If nearer the sun than we are, paper burning games are more ferocious because the heat is more intense.

Well, does the desire to play with the ultimate fire wane or increase?

Do any of them get to wonder if they can apply quantum mechanics to solar games as I do now? (This just might make energy teleportation a thing. I think).

How about the adults?

Adults today also play with solar fire. Despite their serious and ever responsible faces. They are worried actually that maybe they are not as good at playing with the sun as they wished.

Or nuclear power. That unstable, explosive baby.

Yes, they(we) aren't. This energetics-ish is still way out of any adult's league.

Even if when we combine our heads as well as we do now.

But if we adults find a way to do just-enough something and pass on the baton to our children who do such a something as well, then the adults of the future I imagined will probably do the same thing.

Play good solar games so that they can feed, clothe, judge justly and reward competence in a civilization of perhaps some hundred billions of humans.

And they will teach their children this, "Civilization rests on playing good solar games. Fire burns, and the sun burns worst. But if you can play it right, read its moods and nuances well, TLC, well, you get to earn a reasonable living and to help us go forward in time ever stronger".

And the children will look at them and wonder what they just did to earn themselves such passionate adult talk. Of which they didn't understand a single word.

But they'll be content. Their intuition will say, "Pheew, all is well with the world".

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