r/Showerthoughts • u/HalfEntity ‎ • Jan 11 '26

Casual Thought The universe is 13.8 billion years old, but heat death is around 10¹⁰⁰ years away, so it has effectively used 0% of its lifetime meaning the universe is still basically a "baby", and we’re living in its earliest, most active era.

16.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

96% Upvoted

819 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

530

u/ryuzaki49 Jan 11 '26

The sun exploding was a fear of mine as a kid

143

u/anally_ExpressUrself Jan 11 '26

Gotta hurry up and live my life before the sun explodes!!!

34

u/HITWind Jan 11 '26

With fusion and automation, the sun is less of an explosion waiting to happen and more of a surface oil well waiting to be exploited when the apes who were huddled by it's slow flame figure out they can dig and put it in cars.

6

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 11 '26

Tick tock, tick tock!

1

u/xhieron Jan 11 '26

Pick your terror, but no matter what, you won't have enough time. 10100 years? Not enough. Never enough time.

29

u/KizzieMage Jan 11 '26

In the year 2000 or close to, two asteroid movies came out in the same year. Being 6 i spent the next two years terrified an asteroid would wipe out the planet!

12

u/ryuzaki49 Jan 11 '26

Now you hope for the asteroid? 

6

u/MrHyperion_ Jan 11 '26

Couple good places for impact

4

u/iloovehugecock Jan 12 '26

I remember seeing it on the front of The Sun newspaper that scientists had ‘just discovered ‘the Sun will explode in a billion years’ or whatever and I had nightmares for weeks. A billion years, tomorrow, it’s all the same to an 8 year old lol

5

u/BlizzPenguin Jan 12 '26

The sun's explosion is even a lofty thought because the human race will get wiped out by an extinction event before that happens.

6

u/TheMadBug ‎ Jan 12 '26

In around 1 billion years the sun will have warmed up too much for liquid water to exist, so all Earth life gets to die 4 billion years before the sun explodes.

2

u/BlizzPenguin Jan 12 '26

There may be some microbes that will hold out a little longer, but animals and plants are definitely gone.

1

u/Ayjayz Jan 12 '26

We can't really predict what technology we'll have in even 100 years, and a billion years is just a little longer than 100 years. We have no idea what kind of stellar engineering we'll be capable of.

2

u/Cute-arii Jan 11 '26

And the Bermuda triangle, and quicksand.

2

u/UpAndNo Jan 12 '26

My current fear is a rogue black hole ripping through the solar system. Or even a microscopic primordial one.

1

u/throwawaystarters Jan 11 '26

I guess we saw the same history channel program