Ask HN: Does anyone feel anxious about the Sun's death or is it just me?

No disrespect intended, but "human civilization" is an idea, an abstraction, a storyline, in your head. It is a narrative in a TV show you watch. That TV show is tangentially related to your real life with real people and relationships in the sense that there are common themes and actions and storyline abstractions that are similar, and in particular TV storylines can be helpful to the real world by showing useful approaches or solutions or motivating your instincts for care and love in one direction or another. But. There is very little any one of us, even Elon, can do about the world 600,000 years from now. Even 60,000, or 6,000, or 600. Those worlds are not a part of any of our individual spheres of control. More people than you could ever meet will have lived/died without your having any awareness of their lives even in the next 6 years. And notwithstanding all of the other creatures we share the world with. We are just specks of dust. Every moment in the today we have for our experiences and our love is a gift to us. There are many "interesting times" for those who will have their todays in the future, just as there were so many for those whose todays came before. So many more interesting times than we can ever know. All we can know and hope to effect is our today, and our relationships.

It’s 600 million years not 600 thousand. Big difference. Species usually do not last that long so there is no reason to believe any humans will exist at that time.

No, it's not just you. I see variations of this all the time on Quora. And even more questions about the even-more-remote Heat Death of the Universe, and how we might go about preventing it.

I've put a little bit of thought into where this might come from. It's clearly not a realistic thought. There is no meaningful way it impacts your life. Both evolution and technology progress on vastly faster time scales, and so there is nothing for you to gain from thinking about it now.

Pop psychology suggests that it's perhaps depression or boredom. They're catastrophizing to avoid thinking about something else.

If it's causing you distress, you could consider seeing a therapist to get to the root of the problem (which almost certainly has nothing to do with the sun). If it's merely a way for you to amuse yourself and isn't making you unhappy, it's no worse a hobby than a lot of others I can think of.

There are many other things that will get us first. War, societal unrest, toxins, CO2, climate change, ...

Maybe there is a big meteor that resets everything, already hat that once :D. The sun burning out is so far off, my grand, grand, grand, grand, grand, ..., grand kids are still fine in that aspect.

You are aware that multicellular life exist less than 500Myrs right?

The event you're worried about is so far out in the future that no discussion about humans, or any living organism for that matter, is meaningless.

At the root of it all, humans are just part of a larger, enduring tapestry of existence. We arose out of it, and we'll be absorbed back into it.

We have a chance that human civilization doesn't last next century, maybe even this one. We have a far closer existential threat right in front of us. If you want to feel anxious about something, try that. In practice, it won't make any difference.

Regarding time scale, 15 thousands of years ago there was no civilization, 100 thousands of years ago there were not even language, a couple of millions of years ago there were not even hominids. In that context 5 billion years (or just one, as when the sun starts to get into red giant phase life won't be possible here) is just meaningless.

In the other direction, change in our civilization is accelerating, how we went from knowing barely the continents were in, to finally have a global understanding of how it was the world, then global communications, fast travel, globalization, internet and AIs were things that happened increasingly faster. If we don't crash soon somehow. we might be able to at the very least to make self-sufficient space environments within this millennium and not be tied to a single planet.

war and climate change will do the job must faster on out current trajectory. Look at the CO2 levels! At 1000 ppm CO2 out brains functions less good. 1900 CO2 was 200ppm now well over 440 ppm and accelerating!

I don't think there's a chance that humanity survives 600k years

My dude, relax. We're past 1.5°C warming, the Atlantic current is shutting down, the forests in the southern hemisphere are burning, the sea is acidifying, the insects are down to a quarter of biomass pre-industrial revolution, the corals are bleached, the species are either dying or happening upon niches where they'll wreak havok as invasives and we have a huge increase in methane being added to deal with. Also, WW3 is just around the corner and it might be nuclear.

If you have an anxious personality, you will unconsciously seek out things to worry about. Your question could be about the Sun, but it could also be about your back-rationalization of your emotions. You feel worried, and today you were thinking about the Sun, therefore the Sun must be making you feel worried.

I try hard not to worry about the things I cannot change.

I used to have a kind of horror at the thought that the entire universe might be lifeless at some time. Just dead matter with no experience of it by anything.

As far as the sun dying out though, I reckon the human race (or its distant descendants) has enough time to deal with that. I'm more worried we will kill ourselves off long before that becomes a problem.

There's also a small chance the inner solar system gets destabilized before that, in about 3Gyr, and Earth crashes with another planet: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08096

Outer Wilds comes to mind. It's literally a species having to deal with this

it is just you :) because the timeline is so long, you can be sure the society of the year 550 000 will already have made preparations for this (and even if not, there's nothing you can do about it - so why worry?)

If I were you I’d be much, much more worried about right wing populists, libertarian techno-optimists, and interstellar rocks shooting past our planetary chin than about the gentle and slow approach of solar death.

Your species’ current definition of “civilization” isn’t going to make it anywhere near 600K more years, though I think you probably missed at least an order of magnitude anyway.

This is probably more suited to /r/askreddit

It’s not going to stimulate much in depth conversation other than the usual ‘humans won’t be around by then’ response.

Thanks for putting our problems in perspective.

It's in our nature to worry about the state of things after our death. If you have children and grandchildren, it's entirely fair to worry about their well-being long after you will be gone. Same is true even if you don't have kids but have at least worked hard to leave behind something for future generations. (Many of us aren't concerned enough about such things.) If none of that applies to you, perhaps you empathize with humanity as a whole, in which case you'd do well to bury your anxiety by focusing instead on the good you can do for people here and now.

But I am disappointed that if we screw up badly enough, any subsequent species rising to our level probably won't have the time or resources left to go on and surpass us.

It’s just you.

You should worry more about your own death?