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What I think amazes me most about fossil fuels is that they are highly dense, but also impure, forms of sunlight....solar energy.

Life on Earth is Carbon-based, which itself is a natural probabilistic consequence of the characteristics of Carbon itself. Compared with the rest of the Periodic Table, Carbon readily bonds with itself and other elements, allowing the formation of complex molecules including DNA and proteins. This is because Carbon has 4 valance electrons and is uniquely able to form strong, yet pliable bonds with other elements; perfect for life which must maintain enough structure to counter entropy, but be adaptable enough to evolve, grow, and change.

Over billions of years, Carbon-based life has been absorbing energy from the nuclear activity of the Sun, either directly from sunlight, or indirectly by consuming plants or animals that had previously stored this energy. When these life forms died, they took that chemically-stored energy with them to the grave. Over millions of years, deposits of deceased life became covered with silt, compressed, and heated. This formed highly dense deposits of energy that we now call “fossil fuels.”

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