The benefits are so vast and necessary they are almost hard to quantify. Without the Sun, there would be no life on Earth. Period. So that's a big one. Until the invention of electricity, humans based their entire lives around the Sun, from things obvious like farming and agriculture, to things ethereal like creating whole religions around the Sun. On a personal level, exposure to the Sun is good for your psyche (it releases serotonin, a "feel good" chemical which causes mild euphoria, among doing other beneficial things), it helps release Vitamin D, it's good for your heart and your bones and your skin, it increases metabolism, improves digestion, etc (there are more in the link). You can also get a nice tan that the media tells us is oh-so-sexy.
The wonderful duality of life is that the Sun can also be very bad for us. Prolonged exposure to the Sun's harmful radiation can cause sunburn, wrinkles, skin spots, and much worse- lead to skin cancer. The Sun can cause droughts in water supplies, and cause famine and crop failure. The Sun can do some really nasty stuff to the Earth too. Every single second, the Sun bombards the Earth with Solar radiation, enough to kill all life on Earth several times over. The only thing that protects us is our magnetosphere. There are solar cycles, dominated by periods of Solar Maximum (when Solar activity is at its peak) and Solar Minimum (sunspot activity is low). In periods of Solar Maximum, Solar weather can become very sporadic and even dangerous. Solar flares cause billions of tons of radioactive particles to be flung from the Sun, sometimes pointed right at us. They are also responsible for the Northern and Southern Lights. Coronal Mass Ejections are like Solar flares on steroids. They are huge explosions of Solar mass that can cause all sorts of damage. They can fry satellites, are potentially fatal to astronauts, and can and even have caused electric systems to shut down- on Earth. They can act the same way that an EMP works, frying circuitry in an active electrical system.
There are a plethora of other pros and cons, but each is so important and detailed it would take me forever to list them all (assuming that I even could).
The wonderful duality of life is that the Sun can also be very bad for us. Prolonged exposure to the Sun's harmful radiation can cause sunburn, wrinkles, skin spots, and much worse- lead to skin cancer. The Sun can cause droughts in water supplies, and cause famine and crop failure. The Sun can do some really nasty stuff to the Earth too. Every single second, the Sun bombards the Earth with Solar radiation, enough to kill all life on Earth several times over. The only thing that protects us is our magnetosphere. There are solar cycles, dominated by periods of Solar Maximum (when Solar activity is at its peak) and Solar Minimum (sunspot activity is low). In periods of Solar Maximum, Solar weather can become very sporadic and even dangerous. Solar flares cause billions of tons of radioactive particles to be flung from the Sun, sometimes pointed right at us. They are also responsible for the Northern and Southern Lights. Coronal Mass Ejections are like Solar flares on steroids. They are huge explosions of Solar mass that can cause all sorts of damage. They can fry satellites, are potentially fatal to astronauts, and can and even have caused electric systems to shut down- on Earth. They can act the same way that an EMP works, frying circuitry in an active electrical system.
There are a plethora of other pros and cons, but each is so important and detailed it would take me forever to list them all (assuming that I even could).
