Every year, without fail, the sun showers the Earth’s surface with about 10,000 times more energy than all of humanity uses each year — roughly 170 trillion megawatt hours of potential electricity. That exceeds the latent energy contained of all known fossil fuel reserves on the planet.

Of course, capturing all of that sunlight landing on all 197 million square miles of the Earth’s surface is sheer folly. Yet, if human-made solar systems capture and convert to electricity a trifling 0.01 percent that sunlight, the entire planet could be powered many times over.

In theory, the use of solar panels could turn every structure on the planet into its own power planet, and that doesn’t take into account the many and growing utility-scale solar farms in deserts and plains around the world.

All of this was lost on humanity until about 70 years ago, when Bell Labs discovered a new technology allowing sunlight to be converted into usable power. The phone company ai