I love the sun
This is not an allegory about anything else that’s relevant right now
its powerful glow from millions of miles away is the source of the energy that allows all the life on earth to exist. And yet, it has no idea we exist. It’s not even conscious, at least as far as we can tell, we’re pretty sure it’s not. We’ve been studying it off and on for probably the whole time we’ve had science, and we still don’t know if it’s putting out waves or particles. That’s a really weird thing to not know about something that’s right there. And yet, it gives way to the existence of all life on earth.
I love that I can go bask in its warmth whenever i’m cold and it will warm me back up. I love that it can feed me and my family if we plant the right crops, it can give us electricity if we install solar panels, it can do all these things for us because we figured out how to make use of it. We, humans, figured out how to make the sun do all these things for us, and it doesn’t even know we exist. It doesn’t even mind.
The sun will never seek revenge on humanity for all the food we grew with it, or all the gigajoules of electricity we forced it to generate for us, it won’t send down a murderous solar army, and it will rise in the morning regardless of what we humans do. Wether we are here or not to see it or use it, it will be there existing in the void.
Some people historically have failed to understand this. They thought, or at least we think they thought, that they had to sacrifice somebody every single morning to keep the sun happy and make sure it would rise again that day. Just imagine living in a civilization like that. How afraid you would’ve been of the sun, for no reason.
Now am i saying the sun isn’t dangerous? Absolutely not. There is sunburn, heat exhaustion, heck, it can kill you if you’re not careful. But that doesn’t mean we should go smash up all our solar panels and stop all farming, or fly out into space with a big fire extinguisher & try to put it out, or float geostationary satellites in orbit to completely block it out, because then we’d all die. That’s what the conflict is in the movie Sunshine, which is one of my favorite movies ever, and now that i think about it, had one of the most un-obstructive voice-controlled AI computers in recent sci-fi movie memory. It’s not a plot device or anything it’s just a voice interface that works well. But that’s completely unrelated to this topic.
The point i’m making here is that i love the sun and that’s it. there are no parallels to be drawn from this. This is not an allegory about anything else that’s relevant right now like technology or ChatGPT specifically. I know y’all are sick to death of me writing about that lmao