Could humans become “Sun-eaters” in the future?
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Could humans become “Sun-eaters” in the future?<br>A growing movement is trying to turn energy directly into food — reviving an old dream of escaping the violence and inefficiency of eating.
Big Think<br>Apr 24, 2026
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BillionPhotos / Adobe Stock / Jacob Hege<br>by Thomas Moynihan<br>For you to live, other organisms have to die.<br>That’s because humans, like all animals, are heterotrophs. To fuel our bodies, we must eat other living things, killing them in the process. However, most plants and algae are autotrophs. They bootstrap their biomass without the barbarism of eating others: using photosynthesis, turning sunlight, water, and carbon (pulled from the air) into energy. They may kill through competition, but they don’t need to kill to eat.<br>Ultimately, everything we animals eat is a product of photosynthesis. One way or another, sunlight fuels the growth of our food (or our food’s food) before it fuels us. This realization initiated a generations-long mission in humanity to, like plants, disintermediate ourselves from the messiness and immorality of food chains, farming, and carnivorism. To stop killing to live and instead become something cleaner. To get our energy more directly, less brutally.<br>To become stellivores, a.k.a. “Sun-eaters.”<br>By copying the humble autotroph, scientists are helping solve civilization’s profoundest, most perennial problem: how to consume available energy with maximal compassion and minimal externality.
That ambition is no longer purely speculative. Across the globe, scientists are using energy — ultimately derived from the Sun — to transform air, water, and other inorganic inputs into food. Savor is making butter without agriculture, instead replicating processes found near deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Startups like Solar Foods aim to make “food out of thin air,” growing edible protein by feeding microbes with electricity and carbon dioxide.
These efforts and others don’t always eliminate life from food production, but they radically simplify it — replacing farms and animals with microscopic organisms, and ecosystems with controlled environments. By copying the humble autotroph, they are helping us solve civilization’s profoundest, most perennial problem: how to consume available energy with maximal compassion and minimal externality.<br>To understand how we arrived at this point — and where it might lead — we have to follow a trail taking us from early alchemists’ experiments, all the way to calculations of the calories we could get from burning the oceans by atomic fusion. From early theories of digestion to the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, this is the story of how diverse thinkers have long felt an appetite for sunlight. Along the way, it becomes possible to ask whether “sun-eating” isn’t just a human aspiration, but something intelligences elsewhere — throughout the universe — may likewise be drawn to.<br>From stomachs to sunlight
The first human invention was an external stomach. Stone tools predate fire, but paleoanthropologists argue that cooking is what made us, finally, fully human. Fire delegated the effort of digestion from belly to boiling pot. Our bodies could then invest the surplus energy this saved into ganglia rather than guts, into frontal lobes instead of food. Nietzsche was right when he proclaimed, “The soul is a stomach!”<br>However, food — even cooked food — can be troublesome. Indigestion has long plagued us, and before modern medicine and hygiene, foodborne illnesses were as widespread as their causes were misunderstood. What’s more, as far back as the Bible, you can detect a germinal sense among humans that there is something innately unethical about carnivorism. Isaiah 65:25 states that, when Christ returns, “the lion will eat straw like the ox” and “dust will be the serpent’s meat.”<br>While the invention of cooking more than 1 million years ago demonstrated how ingenuity could streamline the ways we metabolize the energy we need, it wasn’t until the rise of modern science that we could properly articulate this as a goal — and thus start explicitly pursuing it.<br>Writing in the 1500s, the Swiss alchemical physician Paracelsus saw everything, even the cosmos itself, as a process of digestion. Alimentation formed the perfect symbol for his vocation as an alchemist: the transmutation of base matter into what’s perfect and spiritual. Tellingly, he compared good digestion — eupepsia — to an inner, nutritive “sunshine.” The more purified and angelic we become — the less tangled up in everything indigestible and dirty — the more we ourselves become like sunlight. “The human body,” he wrote, is “materialized” sunlight.<br>As empirical science grew and confidence in divine order began to crack, people could begin to question nutrition’s natural status quo and ask whether we could reform it.
In 1648, Paracelsus’s Flemish protégé Jan Baptist van Helmont conducted the first quantitative...