Hello,

There are some very good reasons why we don't have a Sun harvesting program. The most important one is that the Sun is a hot ball of ionized gas, called a plasma. The Sun does not have a solid surface of any kind and there are no "Sun rocks" that we could mine and transport back to Earth for their energy. The Sun is also so hot that we could not send astronauts or even robotic spacecraft to collect the Sun's hot plasma and return it to Earth for study. If you get too close to the Sun, you will burn up and die horribly. Even if there was a way to shield yourself from the Sun's intense heat and radiation, any samples of solar plasma you collected would start to cool off immediately and you would just be left with a container of ordinary hydrogen and helium gas by the time you returned to Earth. The Sun is also a lot further away than you realize. The Sun is about 93 million miles away. It is so far away that the light from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach us. If you could drive to the Sun in your car, going 70 miles an hour, it would take you about 150 years to get there. Even if your rope wouldn't burn up from the Sun's instense heat, it would take millions of feet of rope to reach the Sun.

The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion reactions deep within its core. While we cannot go there to directly harvest this energy, we can study the Sun safely from a distance and learn how to create nuclear fusion reactions in laboratories here on Earth. We can also make solar collectors to use the heat and light from the Sun to make electricity or heat water here on Earth.

Kris

You are on the right track thinking that we should be harvesting the energy of the sun. It is the only incoming energy source to our planet! We used to use the sun's energy much more effectively, before we discovered the valueable resource of fossil fuels, but now we are exhausting them and are turning back to the inexhaustable resource of the sun.

Wind energy is solar energy too, as is falling water, and lightning. When we learn to harness these energies, which all come from the sun, we will not have an energy shortage any more. There is plenty!

Kelly