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Why is a bright future assumed?
Sun eventually goes supernova.
It doesn't. It's not massive enough. It turns into a red giant, then collapses into a white dwarf and eventually fusion basically stops.
Yeah but in the process it'll scour the surface off the earth so it's not all bad news
Alternatively, if we wait long enough we always have the heat death of the universe to look forward to.
I read in this book that there's a restaurant just before that happens where you can bounce back and forth between the death of the universe and the hours before it. So that sounds cool.
Try the steak.
I don’t like food that talks to me before I eat it.
Are you a cannibal?
It’s another spin on the aforementioned restaurant. It’s from a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. In said restaurant (Milliways) the cows have been bred to wanting to be eaten and expressing said wish directly to the customers.
Shh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when it's full, you pull the plug out... are you listening?" "I'm listening." "You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole. "Clever." "That's not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I remember now that this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector... backwards!" "Backwards?" "Yes. Threading it backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?" "And that's how the Universe began is it?" said Arthur. "No," said Ford, "but it's a marvelous way to relax.
That's not bright at all. That's the darkest thing.
Very true.
Not before ballooning up and frying the Earth.
Yeah that's totally not a worse death.
Realistically speaking, any of the major changes that happen near the end of a star's life will make their planets uninhabitable on a time scale that seems pretty long from a human perspective. Imagine the last 100 years of climate change, but it just keeps getting worse at the same pace for a million years. By the time a star swells into a giant or explodes in a supernova, there won't be anyone around to notice.
Thermonuclear reactions are very bright