The sun's energy has a great effect on earth. Its light provides energy for photosynthesis in plants and algae, the basis for the food chain, which ultimately feeds almost all life on earth.
Sunspots also have an indirect but significant impact on life here on earth.
As early as the nineteenth century, scientists noticed that high levels of activity on the sun, like flares and sunspots, were followed shortly by strong fluctuations in magnetic instruments on earth. They wondered what caused these changes. Scientists today have discovered a lot about the way the sunspots affect the earth. Hot material called plasma near a sunspot interacts with magnetic fields, and the plasma can burst up and out from the sun, in what is called a solar flare. Energetic particles, x-rays and magnetic fields from these solar flares bombard the earth in what are called geomagnetic storms.