so to anyone who never asked for this, here's my intro into the basics of energy metabolism
in the previous post i discussed why energy metabolism is important in the first case. without energy, nothing moves.
energy in nature basically 100% comes from the sun. Well, it's not 100% actually but pretty close to it. There's some life that can live off of deep sea hydrogen or sulfur or some other mineralic energy sources (deep biosphere) that are of volcanic origin and therefore not sunlight-powered.
but most life lives on or close to the surface and is therefore solar-powered. That's why it makes sense to consider nature's solar panels (yes, they exist) as the first chapter about energy metabolism. Yes, nature has solar panels! They look something like this:
as you can see, they have cables to transport the energy away from the collection site and into the wider plant body. the energy gets then used to grow fruits or the vegetative plant body (stem, branches, roots, ...). the fruits get sometimes eaten by animals, where the energy is used for physical movement and heat. at this point, the energy leaves the domain of nature and returns to the domain of physics (in the form of heat) until it radiates away into outer space through thermal radiation.
