Science fiction and the death of the sun

But then why start a colony? If you're just looking around, then the massive investment to build a comfortable habitat isn't worthwhile. I think the incentives just don't line up; that's my Fermi paradox answer. I especially think it's unlikely that anyone would set off on an exploration where they were going to die of old age before ever seeing anything.

> We've got millions of years to work out how.

What if it isn't possible? The sheer scale involved suggests there's nothing to be done. It is a bonfire exponentially larger than all the mass we can conceivably bring to bear upon it in any way. When it burns out, it burns out. Moving the planet is a little more feasible [1], but doing it with solar sails would take about a billion years, even if the sail was 19x the diameter of Earth. An ion drive would be snappier, but we'd have to have effectively unlimited energy to make that happen, and we'd have to eject about a sixth of the Earth's mass from outside of the atmosphere on some sort of planetary gimbal.

[1]: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-rocket-scientist-explains-...

> how can you possibly know what the limits will be

Oh I can't. But there are limits, and we'll hit them eventually. The most obvious limits are energy and mass. We obviously can't do anything that would require more mass than exists in the solar system, and the ceiling for practically accessible mass for any given purpose is likely much lower. Some elements are quite rare. There may not be that much energy to go around. There are also likely soft time limits: A project that takes ten thousand years might simply be beyond us politically. Some tasks, like full comprehension of the human brain, might simply be too complicated to ever be realized. The longer you think about it, the more plausible limitations materialize.

Eddington brings up this issue in "The Internal Constitution of the Stars" (1920), and discusses at length why the eclipse theory doesn't hold up:

"There are certain stars, known as Cepheid variables, which undergo a regular fluctuation of light of a characteristic kind, generally with a period of a few days. This light change is not due to eclipse. Moreover, the color quality of the light changes between maximum and minimum, evidently pointing to a periodic change in the physical condition of the star. Although these objects were formerly thought to be double stars, it now seems clear that this was a misinterpretation of the spectroscopic evidence. There is in fact no room for the hypothetical companion star; the orbit is so small that we should have to place it inside the principal star. Everything points to the period of the light pulsation being something intrinsic in the star; and the hypothesis advocated by Shapley, that it represents a mechanical pulsation of the star, seems to be the most plausible. I have already mentioned that the observed period does in fact agree with the calculated period of mechanical pulsation, so that the pulsation explanation survives one fairly stringent test. But whatever the cause of the variability, whether pulsation or rotation, provided only that it is intrinsic in the star, and not forced from outside, the density must be the leading factor in determining the period. If the star is contracting so that its density changes appreciably, the period can not remain constant. Now, on the contraction hypothesis the change of density must amount to at least 1 percent. in 40 years. (I give the figures for 8 Cephei, the best-known variable of this class.) The corresponding change of period should be very easily detectable. For 8 Cephei the period ought to decrease 40 seconds annually."

You can find the article at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/6491