Can you go blind by staring at the sun? How long does it take? Does a set of binoculars or a telescope amplify it? How fast will it happen with a high powered telescope?

Staring at the sun can burn your retinas....which can cause blindness.....

yeah.

Ever burned ants with a magnifying glass? Well imagine doing that to your eye.

well duh. but if you dont belive me try it yourself. dont say i didnt warn you.

youo will definitely go blind. but chances are, before your natural reflexes will make you close you eyes before you suffer any significant damage to your eyes.

i would be really interested in seeing them test this. I have always wondered this as well

I read a Ripley's believe it or not book 5 years ago and I still remember this one: A 50 year old man hasn't had any food in 20 years and apparently feeds himself by staring at the sun. I've heard that the sun provides Vitamin C and stuff but this is crazy. If this is true, this would be your answer.

@Notyouraveragejoe

You should certainly believe it not! The report in Ripley's may have been a faithful account of what this man claimed, but it is physically impossible to feed yourself solely by looking at the sun. I will use a logical tool to show you the impossibility and downright absurdity of this claim. Making use of the sun's energy refers to using that energy for life:

P1.) This man can derive energy from staring at the sun.

P2.) All plants can use photosynthesis to make use of the sun's energy.

P3.) For all things, if that thing is neither a plant nor a rare species of bacteria, that thing cannot make use of the sun's energy.

P4.) All men who are plants can make use of the sun's energy.

P5.) All men who are a certain species of bacteria can make use of the sun's energy.

P6.) No men are a certain species of bacteria

P7,C.) Therefore the man is a plant!

Obviously, the conclusion is false, but I can assure you as someone who is very near having a BA in philosophy (trained in logical inference,) that the argument is valid. The conclusion cannot be false while all the premises are true.

Premisses 2-6 are all true, so by disjunctive syllogism, (commonly known as the process of elimination,) Premise 1 is false.

Well, I disagree with P4 and your rejection of P7 on the grounds that you haven't supported those statements with necessity.

My Question is can U go instantly blind by looking into a solar eclipse.

Well, it CAN damage your eyes. I was getting my eyes checked for my driver's licence - no real problems there, thankfully - the optician said told me that prolonged exposure to bright sunlight can cause lesions on your eyes. I did my license in Italy in July, so I was strongly advised to wear sunglasses.
By the way, the optician I went to also told me that research has indicated that you can help repair these lesions by eating a lot of strawberries, blackberries, etc. Is this true?

@Qwerty,

While you are right that I did not take any explicit logical step to get from P1 to P4, I do not see why I need to, as it's effectively a restatement of P2. Unfortunately, I haven't taken any courses devoted to predicate logic, but I am nontheless well aquainted with it. Elements of subsets inheret universal properties from their supersets. I won't attempt to prove this, because it hardly seems appropriate to do so here. A few Venn Diagrams should satisfy you, however, that this must be the case. P1 and P2 are contingent facts about the world and do not need to be grounded in necessity, and premisses in general do not need to be grounded in necessity for an argument to be valid. Such grounding gaurantees soundness, but little else, so far as I can see at this time, and as I designed the argument to be a proof by contradiction, I was fully aware that the argument would turn out unsound. For reference to those who may not know, an argument is valid if and only if the conclusion cannot possibly be false while all of its premisses are true, and an argument is sound if and only if all premisses and the conclusion are true. So as you see, I have a valid, unsound argument, which is the form of all proofs by contradictions. Such proofs are a very useful but little known tool outside of math and philosophy circles.