Solar Power

Welcome to the 40th edition of Safe For Work. A new podcast episode exploring the role of science fiction in safety and technological innovation, some news, and some sci-fi from Matt Cantor inspired by solar power.

In Safety News

• Hailing Copper fined by OSHA

• Engineering geeks and space aficionados will enjoy this story about SpaceX’s Starship rocket

Safe For Work Podcast

Episode 2 is available discussing the impact of science fiction in industrial innovation.

Glass Bright

Matt Cantor

Everything is glass when you get bright enough. In the dead of night in Alberta, you can’t see through a piece of paper. Hold it up to the full moon, and maybe you’ll get a little glimpse of a white circle through it. Hold it up to a good television-set, and you can start to see people moving, cars rolling by, whatever. Turn the brightness up all the way, and the worst the paper will do is blur things a little bit.

Put a flashlight right up to your palm and watch it shine right through to the other side. Close your eyes and stare directly at the sun. Everything is glass when you get bright enough.

Solid metal is glass when you get bright enough.

The sun shines in my office, without any windows. Halfway between Mercury and the edge of the photosphere, the sun shines everywhere. The four feet of solid hypersteel are enough to prevent most-- most-- of the harmful radiation from reaching me, here at my desk, but everything is glass when you get bright enough; soft orange light streams through the wall to my left, from the star behind it-- it casts my shadow against the opposite wall, it warms my cheek. It’s a miracle of science that it just warms me and doesn’t cook me-- any of us, here in the Observatory.

I turn my head to glance at the soft orange wall. “Talk to me,” I whisper, and I wonder if the sun can hear me, so close-- still tens of millions of miles, but who could be closer? People back on Earth have been whispering little wishes to the sun as long as there have been people on Earth-- but there have never been people here. Maybe we were just too far away. “Talk to me.”

The patterns are stable, today. Somehow, I can feel that on my cheek-- somehow-- and the readouts from the hundreds of instruments arrayed across the Observatory all agree. A normal solar cycle-- and we would know better than anyone.

The only one who would know better is the sun herself. What does she know? What are her secrets?

Why did she do it?

Is she going to do it again?

“Talk to me,” I whisper. “Just tell me what we did wrong.”

Was it something that someone had done? Was it something that someone had not done? A blasphemy? A failure to pay proper tribute? Once, people had spilled rivers of blood down temple steps to keep the sun happy, and the sun had stayed happy. When was the last time anyone had done that? Or had someone been complaining about the heat?-- gone and blamed her for the hole in the ozone, or the melting of the ice-caps or the Summer days that stretch into December and start again in late February?

Her vengeance had been so targeted. It must have been something someone did or said or didn’t do or say. CME just barely scraping the edge of the Earth-- warm-knife-slicing through the atmosphere and across the surface of Western Europe, heat and force and radiation peeling away cities and towns and forests and lakes-- particles into particles into particles into particles. And then off into space. A glancing blow. A charred scar.

Maybe it was Versaille, right at the heart. A couple hundred years too late, but think of the hubris-- a man calling himself “The Sun King”. How dare he?

It must have been someone there, people say. They say it to say it-- to have something to say, after something like that, because you always have to have something to say after something like that. You can’t just say nothing. You have to laugh at it. What kind of monster are you if you can’t even laugh at it?

How long has it been? It’s been long enough, now, you’re allowed to laugh at it, I think. It’s from before I was born-- decades before I was born. I’m allowed to laugh at it, I think. I wake up every morning here on the Observatory if there’s such as a thing as morning without sunrise or a night before it-- every morning I wake up and I roll myself out of my sleeping bag in my little lead compartment and I slide open the panel into the rest of my cabin, and there is that soft orange glow, coming through the wall-- everything is glass when you get bright enough. Every morning-- “Looks like I haven’t done anything to piss you off, yet.”

It comes and goes-- safety and security-- certainty, understanding-- mystery. The heavens are impossible, random, stars scattered like spilled sesame-seeds, here and there, sometimes moving-- the sun and the moon, coming and going. And then come the constellations, order-- stories to hold the sky together. The sun and moon run from horizon to horizon because they are being chased by wolves, or pulled along by a chariot. The stars are a map-- here come the seasons, here is when it will be cold, here is when it will be warm-- the clouds teach us the rain. Here is when the animals come and go. The moon has her phases-- the sun has her eclipse, and it’s all strange and magical until you start to see the patterns, and then you can be safe and secure. You can be certain in your understandings. When were you born?-- which stars were in the sky?-- which planets were where?-- we know how they move, now, we know what they are?-- the stars are a map to your whole life. This is who you should fall in love with. This is how you should choose your friends. This is which career is best for you. Here are the sun’s convection zones. This is the temperature of the core. These are the laws of quantum physics which allow for the fusion of hydrogen into helium. Here is what causes sunspots-- here is how to predict them-- here is what they do. Here is the solar cycle-- see, the steady ups and downs. Safety and security-- certainty and understanding.

And now here comes a flare from nowhere, for no reason. There goes half of Europe, into nowhere, for no reason.

I check the readouts on the screen on my desk, and then I check them again. The patterns are stable, today.

The patterns were stable right before it happened. Nothing at all made it seem like anything was going to happen. Nothing at all makes it seem like anything is going to happen now. The core temperature is at its usual point in the cycle. The convection-zones are all flowing smoothly, no disruptions. The six-hundred other instruments that hadn’t even been invented when it happened are telling us that six-hundred other metrics we hadn’t even known about are normal. Everything is normal.

But here I am. I get up from my desk and walk over to the gently glowing left-hand wall of my office-- forget all the instruments and the readouts of the Paris Memorial Observatory and Safety Station-- the six-hundred things about six-hundred things-- forget all that. I place my palm on the smooth metal, feel the easy warmth-- through four feet of hypersteel, it’s only about as warm as dried clothes-- even though the other side of the wall is hotter than the most molten rock back on Earth, so far away. Through four feet of hypersteel, I only have to squint just the slightest bit as I stare at the silhouettes of my bones and blood-vessels through my skin, even though I’d be going blind, fully burnt out if I was staring like this through plain old glass-- but everything is glass when you get bright enough.

“Please,” I whisper, and I’m close enough here, at the wall, for her to really hear me, I’m sure of it. “Talk to me. Tell me how to keep you happy.”

I pray a little prayer. I promise a little promise. I make a little apology, for whatever-- whatever, whatever. If it happens again today, I know that at least it won’t be because of me.

See you next week as we explore sustainable energy.

Stay safe.