fossil fuels
so the other day i was pondering how much solar energy the earth sequesters as fossil fuels every year. good question. let's first do the order of magnitude. there are 1 trillion barrels of oil on earth. 100x as much coal. and another 100x just to shut up anyone who says i might have missed something. let's say we've only been saving fossil fuels since the age of the dinosaurs 100 million years ago. by them numbers the world saved 100 million barrels of oil per year. which is about how many barrels of oil humans consume per *day*. now take into account that the sun bathes the planet in 10,000 times as much energy as humans use and we get our result. the earth converts bloody little sun power into fossil fuels every year. so here we have an application of the big-little issue. how much oil is there? well, it's a tiny number (saved per year) times a huge number (the number of years). some human brains lock into the result being infinite. and some human brains lock into that being zero. reality is, it's infinite enough to support the exponential growth of human consumption. until it isn't. then it's zero.