Misdirection is a powerful psychological force. It just feels right that energy can come from nowhere, because that's how our world works! There is stored energ

Misdirection is a powerful psychological force. It just feels right that energy can come from nowhere, because that's how our world works! There is stored energy all over the place, but we weren't there to see it get stored, so it's like it came from thin air. Energy just comes up out of the ground, as trees or coal or oil or uranium, and we use it, and when we need more we just do more digging or chopping! Geologic time is an alien concept for humans, far more alien than anything ever shown on Star Trek. Even those of us with lots of science education have trouble grasping it. It's really quite hard to look at an oil field and think of it as the accumulation of millions of years' worth of solar energy. It's like trying to remember that you are one of seven billion people in the world: that number is so much larger than the number of your friends that you can't really understand it.