I was sitting in my chair, thinking. I was thinking about the energy crisis, and how a lot of energy is wasted. It’s a problem. Solutions are easy, when you think about them.

Thinking of how the light from the sun hits earth, I realize again what a tiny little itty bitty bit of light energy that is compared to all the light the sun puts out in all directions from itself. I can’t even figure it because I don’t know the math and I’m too lazy to learn it, but I know it’s a lot, and the earth’s share is miniscule.

And, because we keep rotating as we revolve, but I don’t think the sun rotates like that as it revolves round the galaxy, and then does some kind of rolling as the galaxy revolves around the universe, if that’s what it does, I think it’s a big waste of energy. We get just a little bit of it, and all the rest goes out into space, except for the little bit that gets stopped and used by the other planets, of which there are not many.

And the sun is just our own little star. The whole universe is wasting energy in all directions at an alarming rate.

Keeping it local to our own solar system, I speculate how we could solve our own energy crisis.

We could make solar panels and put them out in space the way we power our satellites. We could make a Big Network. I mean Really Big. We’d probably have to use materials we mined from the other planets, moons too, because the earth just doesn’t have enough to encircle and encompass the whole sun.

We’d probably maybe start by making a ring around the sun the way Saturn did with rings around itself.

We’d devise a way to get the energy back to earth, probably by reflection. That’s what engineering is for, to find ways, or make them.

That would just start out being a little strip of energy collection like a band around the sun, so we’d probably expand it on both sides, right and left, to make a broad band. Then, when we saw how that worked out, we could make it broader and broader until the whole sun was surrounded in all directions by solar panels which would certainly give us more energy than we know what to do with.

And we’d probably keep our solar dome band just outside our own orbit so we wouldn’t have to use so much material and take so long to build it.

The closer planets would be inside our solar panel dome ring, Mercury and Venus, number one and two, because Earth is third from the sun. We’d probably include Mars out of sentiment, but the outer planets would be outside our solar panel dome ring, and it would be hard on them with no sunlight, because we blocked it with solar panels and were taking it all.

I don’t know enough about math and gravity to know if cutting off the light would also cut down the gravity to those outer planets, and they might just become disinterested and drift away.

I know how it feels when you’re excluded.

I also know this whole Idea is a Big Project and would take years.

Yes, maybe it could help solve our energy crisis which is perverting our politics which isn’t dealing with current crises like global warming. That’s a problem because already we’re getting too much solar energy which makes us too hot and don’t know what to do with it.

So I guess we’re not ready yet for my Big Idea.

Meanwhile, because I do want to do something to help, I may put solar panels on my roof.