Thought for the day:
The precarious human predicament owes its existence to thieves. Jewel thieves. Good ones. Except that “jewel” is misspelled. The word is joule. A term describing energy. That’s important to humans because we use joules all the time. We use them every second of every day our entire lives. Without them we’d all be, well, not even here at all. Every single one of the gillions of joules we use come from the marvelous joule thieves. Long before there were humans or anything else that walked around on its own, the thieves figured out how to trap small bits of the ridiculous flood of energy pouring out of the sun. The thieves are plants, mostly green, and mostly rooted to one spot save for some algae floating around in bodies of water. The sun hurls this prodigious blast of energy out into space for reasons known only to it.

The plants snatch tiny little morsels of it without the sun even knowing. Plants can do this magic because they have something we don’t. They have chlorophyll. Say it this way: “kloor” (rhymes with floor) – “oh” (as in OMG) – “fill” (that one should be easy). Chlorophyll is a molecule that happens to be green. If we had that molecule in our skins we’d be the color of soybean plants. Which, now that I think of it, would be really handy. We could just go out in the sun for awhile to rejuvenate ourselves. Of course to maximize our use of sunlight we’d have to walk around naked. Not a big deal since we all look pretty much the same, and clothes are way too expensive, so good riddance. With chlorophyll in our skins we could stand in the sun catching light energy and use it to make our own caffeine right on the spot, just like a coffee tree (or bush, or whatever they’re called). Starbuck’s would go bankrupt. We’d have taken out the middle man, so to speak. I’d miss the taste but I’d get used to it. Think of the money I’d save! Someone please tell me there’s a genetic scientist working on this somewhere because I want to sign up. I want to go green. Talk about cool!
PP