Avi Loeb

She's just having problems with her Excel sheet.

You're going to tell her the sun's dying?

Poor dear.

Yeah, so she said...

Wow, I can't believe it, she said.

But she didn't know that?

No, she said it's against my religion.

Oh.

So I said, look, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's very simple.

We know that the sun will die for a simple fact, that there are lots of dead suns already in the Milky Way galaxy.

These are stars like the sun that formed before the sun.

The sun formed just in the last one third of cosmic history.

It's 4.6 billion years old.

The age of the universe is 13.8.

4.6 is exactly one-third of 13.8.

So most of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy were formed billions of years before the sun.

By the way, that's another argument that we may be late to the party.

There might be others visiting us because the Voyager spacecraft will take less than a billion years to cross the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Right.

The fact that other stars are older than the sun is a good argument for why we should expect something to be, even with the 1970s technologies of Voyager, it could make the journey between other stars and us over the time difference between the formation of the sun and the formation of their star.