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

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.

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.

Thanks for putting our problems in perspective.

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.

You're right, my bad