We Are Literally All Made of Sunshine

Here is a thought experiment I think proves that we are all made of little rays of sunshine.

NASA puts a spaceship into deep space. This spaceship is a perfect sealed biosphere and everything the astronauts would need are generated in this perfect self contained system. Food is grown, water is recycled, air is produced naturally, and everyone is healthy. This perfect spaceship has two occupants, one male and one female. The two astronauts get bored, have freaky space sex and she gets pregnant. Twelve months later she delivers her baby in space on board the spaceship and it is a healthy 10 lb girl. The spaceship returns to earth and NASA discovers that it has 10lbs more mass than when it departed.

Obviously the 10 lbs of mass is from the baby, but where did this mass come from?

This baby is literally the result of little rays of sunshine!

Was this a legitimate experiment that was actually conducted?

No.

1. The ship would weigh less due to the loss of mass through the burning of fuel. That is the most prominent flaw in your experiment.

2. In a perfectly sealed environment, there would be no change in the weight, only a change in the forms the matter is in.

When the woman would become pregnant, the baby would take some of her own weight; it would absorb nutrients through her body through the foods she takes in. The foods on the ship will literally become part of the new child. It is not 'new', the chemicals and elements from the mother, the food, and other chemical processes will make up the child.

It's fundamentally the same for the growing of food on the ship; the food is not new (you didn't think that far? If they yield a 50 pound harvest of potatoes, it would technically be 50 pounds extra with your logic.), the food consists of elements and nutrients taken from the ground.

Everything is recycled, and everything is a just a part of something else used in a different form.

reply to post by Setharoo


That is a really interesting thought. Did you draw this conclusion by accounting for the plants photosynthesis, as they could also arrive back home with more mass from the plants as well since they too are regenerating. Good Post...Peace

That babies are made from little rays of sunshine is a very sweet idea.
It is a good explanation I would tell a very small child.

Please, talk to your parents or someone you trust and ask them how babies are made.

I am going to talk with my 16 year old grandson as ever since he was a baby I've called him my little ray of sunshine. I need to make sure he knows the real deal.

My best to you and I must say again your theory is very nice.

First... How do you know that the ship would weigh 10 lbs more? Second, though I admit that sunshine is an element in the development of plant life, and therefore can be converted into solid matter/energy, there is no evidence that the sunshine is sunshine any longer...

And what of the plant matter in this hypothetical environment (I presume there is some...)?

I think you are making assumptions here that have no proof behind them.

A completely closed biosphere would weigh the same as it did before it left the earth. ALL of the materials that make up the baby came from the materials within the biosphere -- plants, water, minerals, etc.

I'm assuming when you said completely closed, you meant nothing could get in or out; however you mentioned sunshine, so I also assume you are letting photons of light in. But since photons have "zero" mass, even the "sunshine" would not add weight.

Therefore, if the baby weighs 10 pounds, then everything else (except the baby) within the biosphere, when added together, would weigh 10 pounds less than when the biosphere was originally sealed (but the total weight with the baby would be exactly the same). The materials that made up the baby didn't come from nothing -- those materials came from what the baby's mother consumed during preganancy, and from the mother herself.

By the way, the incubation period for a human baby is 9 months, not 12 months.


[edit on 8/9/2008 by Soylent Green Is People]

reply to post by Setharoo


While the reasoning for your scenario has the flaws that have been pointed to upthread; in a sense you can say we are made of sunshine due to the fact that all the atoms in our bodies, save the hydrogen, were created in a star and spread throughout interstellar space when the star died.

Originally posted by dizziedame
Please, talk to your parents or someone you trust and ask them how babies are made.

Everyone knows how babies are made! Mommy and Daddy go to the hospital and buy one with their BlueCross credit card. The stork makes daily deliveries to the ER from the cabbage patch and Mommy picks out the one she can afford. Mom and Dad didn't have much money when they bought me.....

reply to post by IAttackPeople

IAttackPeople --

I have always found that idea to be pretty awe-inspiring. It's incredible to think that the carbon and metals in my body, the steel in the spoon I'm using to eat my ice cream, and all of the elements heavier than iron were formed in a supernova explosion of a star that ceased to exist 6 or 8 (or so) billion years ago.

It staggers the mind to think the that elements in my body were part of an ancient star that could have been the center of a solar system that was perhaps -- just perhaps -- the home to another long-dead intelligent civilization.

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
By the way, the incubation period for a human baby is 9 months, not 12 months.

Yeah, kind of blew any credibility my theory might have had with that one. Are you sure it isn't 12 months?

I can see that my ideas are seriously flawed, but isn't there some truth to the ray of sunshine idea? Doesn't sunshine add a small amount of mass to a plant as it grows? I thought I remember reading this somewhere. Doesn't a particle accelerator create mass from energy?

Are we not patterned out of "Chromosomes" or Light bodies? You are on the right track. Peace

Originally posted by Setharoo
I can see that my ideas are seriously flawed, but isn't there some truth to the ray of sunshine idea? Doesn't sunshine add a small amount of mass to a plant as it grows?

According to chemistry books, photosynthesis uses the energy from light to create carbohydrates from CO2 and H2O. There is no mass increase.

Doesn't a particle accelerator create mass from energy?

Yes, but you would need to accelerate the baby a lot more.

Originally posted by Setharoo
Doesn't a particle accelerator create mass from energy?

WOAH!!

No, no. It most certainly does NOT.

The Amount of ENERGY needed to create MATTER is absolutely PHENOMENAL.

Einsteins E = MC ^2 (squared) equation illustrates this.

SQUARED means "times by itself" eg: 4^2 = 4x4 which equals 16

10^2 = 100

100^2 =10,000

And so on....

So what you've got here is:

(Mass x 299 792 458 m / s) X (Mass x 299 792 458 m / s) = X

WHATEVER value you put in for mass (or ENERGY in this case), the amount of energy to create mass is going to be HUGE.

We can't create mass out of energy.....yet

Further more, energy contains NO mass and as such, cannot ADD mass to anything. The ENERGY plants use for photosynthesis, is used to create carbohydrates from CO2 and H2O (As dilligent ATS memeber nablator pointed out)

Cheers

AoN

[edit on 15-8-2008 by Anomic of Nihilism]

Originally posted by Setharoo

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
By the way, the incubation period for a human baby is 9 months, not 12 months.

Yeah, kind of blew any credibility my theory might have had with that one. Are you sure it isn't 12 months?

It's 12 months in space... j/k

Actually it'd be interesting to see what effect microgravity would have on the human reproductive process. Might make it more difficult for the baby to insert itself into the pelvis correctly prior to birth, perhaps delaying it a bit. And going back a bit, would a fertilized egg even properly implant in the uterus in microgravity? My guess would be that the miscarriage rate would be insanely high.