You and your friends go camping on a chilly fall evening. What's the first thing you do? Create a fire ring with fist-sized rocks and light that popsicle stand.
The campfire starts friendly, warming hands, cooking dinner, offering a sense of safety that invites you to lean in. But stay too long, and that same fire scorches boots, melts gear, and leaves only ash where comfort once lived.
Stars That Don’t Know When to Stop
Watching aging stars swallow nearby planets as they expand is something astronomers have observed for years. The planets misbehaved—crying global cooling, or warming, or, sigh, dammit! Let’s just call it climate change, like some inhabitants are doing on an unnamed planet.
No, those planets didn't misbehave; gravity simply stopped being polite. As stars grow older, they burn hotter, swell outward, and pull anything close into an extreme case of global warming, leading to a fiery end.
Those distant star systems matter because our Sun follows the same rules, without intent or drama, just physics running on schedule.
How the Sun Actually Works
Our Sun stays alive by smashing hydrogen atoms together in its core, a process that releases energy in the form of light and heat. Gravity pulls inward, while energy pulls outward, an intricate balance keeping the sun stable.
Hydrogen thins out over time, and the Sun compensates by squeezing harder, raising its core temperature. A hotter core means more outflowing energy, and more energy causes the Sun to expand and brighten: a bigger, brighter Sun, hotter everything.
There's no sudden event; those changes unfold over billions of years, but slow doesn't mean harmless.
I remember watching an episode of Nova about this topic when I was really young. Because I'm wired differently, I freaked out more about the Sun eating us and less about realizing what "billions of years" meant.
Global Warming, the Long Version
Our Earth faces trouble long before the Sun becomes a planet-eating red giant. As solar output increases, our planet absorbs more energy, warming oceans, causing ice packs to retreat, and destabilizing weather patterns.
Picture a stove burner turning up one notch every few million years. At first, nobody notices it. Eventually, the water in the pan boils.
Earth doesn't explode; it cooks, and we're the hot dogs in the middle.
Why Earth Can’t Just Move Back
Some people with low IQs, let's call them lefties, wonder why the Earth couldn't drift away. One word: gravity. That basic tenet of physics locks planets into stable orbits. Without a major outside shove, Earth stays put while the Sun grows brighter. The habitable Goldilocks Zone shifts outward, leaving us in the cosmic dust.
That's when the fun starts: oceans evaporate, water vapor traps more heat, temperatures spike. Life as we know it ends. Permanently.
There's no need for urgency; it's a long-running clock, and physics never misses an appointment.
When the Sun Really Changes
The Sun expands into a red giant after the hydrogen runs out. First, Mercury and Venus disappear, and we may survive for a brief time as a physical object. The oceans and atmosphere have already vanished, making a bad day evolve into a REALLY bad day.
As if it couldn't get worse, the sun sheds its outer layers and collapses into a white dwarf, while the solar system settles into a new, quiet cold.
It's not about anger or a temper tantrum, like Thanos; it's inevitable.
Why Any of It Matters
When considering cosmology, we're reminded that permanence mostly lives in our imagination. Stars age, planets recycle, and stability comes in narrow windows surrounded by chaos.
Thinking that way doesn't cheapen life; it sharpens it, and temporary things tend to matter more.
Final Thoughts
When we circle back to our campfire, we find it still feels warm, with plenty of time left to enjoy it. Despite the obvious, nobody sensible confuses warmth for safety and calls it a long-term plan.
The sun continues to burn, while the Earth keeps circling. There will be a day when heat wins, but not today or tomorrow: just eventually.
When those days come, the fire will simply grow too large to sit beside anymore.
