To technology-glutted moderns, the celebration of the New Year may seem like a fleeting one-day inebriation, a hiccup in the 365-day trajectory it takes for our planet to complete one orbit around the sun.

May their hangover cure include realizing that without the sun’s heat and light, they, like the Earth, would be a lifeless, frigid and lonely piece of rock. We are but a footnote to the sun’s extravagant powers.

Take a breather from AI to consider the works of the sun: it created all living matter, our bodies and brains, circadian rhythms, atmosphere, seas, climate and weather patterns, and gives energy to the green plants that provide our food and oxygen. You can’t call the sun a technology, such as AI; it’s more than that. It’s the difference between day and night.

We marvel. We inquire. What intelligence created the stars, of which the sun is ours? What gives us our days and nights? What wondrous higher power designed the sun to create and synchronize all life on Earth?

Given our extraordinary powers by the sun, we humans have been playing God for thousands of years, ever since we domesticated the first wild plants and animals. We transformed grains into bread, cotton into cloth, flax into linen. Pasture grasses doubled the size of livestock, blessing us with food, leather and wool, while colorful flowers have cheered our daily lives and fresh vegetables have nourished both body and soul.

Mendelian genetics makes AI look like “superficial intelligence”, especially since we had no technology other than our brains, senses and opposable thumbs. It took us longer than the lightning speed of today’s myriad quicksilver innovations, but with the sun we created the foundations of civilization.

The sun never sleeps: ultra-violet radiation stimulates our bodies both to produce vitamin D and to increase serotonin, helping strengthen our bones and reduce anxiety respectively. Not coincidentally, fresh flowers match the effectiveness of the average mood-enhancing anti-depressant, according to research conducted by Jeanette Haviland-Jones at Rutgers University. Flower color was invented by the sun. Twinkle, twinkle.

Along with the wheel, the plough and written language, the genetic domestication of life has proven to be the template of modern technology, including AI. Horticulture–protected gardens as in plots and parks–gave rise to agriculture–protected fields as in amber waves of grain–when we moved from family and tribal settlements into ancient cities.

If AI is the Terminator, as Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested last summer (and who should know better having acted the part in the all too prescient 1984 film), the garden is the Germinator.

Leaping into this New Year of 366 days, we mark a beginning for both us and the sun, the beginning of the beginning, without which we would not have this day or any day, much less our living planet. So, join me in a toast to the sun, without whom we’d be nothing.

A version of this article appeared in The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, the Quad-City Times and the Charleston Gazette-Mail.