Toxic Biomimicry: How Humans Turned Sunlight into an Industry

Solar power was never a human technology. It was prototyped 3.5 billion years ago by bacteria, upgraded a billion years later by Earth’s first terraforming civilisation of oxygen-producing microbes, and finally adopted by algae, higher plants and forests as the ecosystem’s official engine.

Solar capture became the dominant energy currency on Earth because it was free, abundant, but most of all, open-sourced. Although only 10% of Earth’s 10 million species photosynthesize today, several million still have remnants of photosynthetic genes in their DNA, revealing the central legacy of photosynthesis in the evolution of all life on Earth. Even humans have evolutionary links to photosynthesis, sharing much of their metabolic machinery with plants: electron transport chains, redox reactions, and membrane energy systems. We took the same tools of photosynthesis and repurposed them to develop our own mammalian metabolism. This metabolism of course, still depends on photosynthesis, indirectly. All the food we eat, except mushrooms and a few other items, is ultimately produced using the power of the sun. We are literally made of sunlight.

But solar power was more than just a technology for ancient Earth. It was disruptive energy socialism in action, built around a shared and unlimited resource available to all, much like the air we breathe. The difference between a tree and a solar panel is that one is an energy democracy and the other is a technobroligarchy. A tree makes energy, food and housing for hundreds of species, while the solar panel makes energy for humans, money for oligarchs, and polluted wastelands for their children. Photosynthesis regulates the climate and feeds the ecosystem. Solar panels destroy the climate and the ecosystem so that necrocapitalist predators from the Epstein class can make a profit.

Throughout history, human technology has been an exercise in creating unsustainable versions of pre-existing natural innovations. We made dirty, counterfeit versions of every single natural technology we came across: we looked at birds, we made planes. We looked at geckos, we made toxic dry adhesives. We learned about uranium decay in the core of our planet, and we created nuclear fission. And 3.5 billion years after its original invention, human investors developed a proprietary, monetizable, polluting version of photosynthesis: the solar panel.

This is the short version of a much bigger idea: that human technology doesn’t innovate – it degrades what already exists in nature. I explore this in depth in my paid and free essays, where I break down the hidden costs of growth, technology, and capitalism. This kind of writing only exists because readers choose to support it. If this resonated, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Further reading into the relationship between technology and collapse: Technophilia: The Mental Illness Behind Civilisational Collapse

Further reading into the trap of innovation: Why Civilisations Collapse: The Existential Paradox of Innovation

Further reading into the toxic technological cycle of replacement economics: Replacement Economics: The Scam That Saved Capitalism

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