☀️ While navigating the kindergarten playground blacktop on a school tricycle, I kept my head down, troubled by the sun.
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Recently, my father, a family doctor interested in science, had the black-and-white-with-rabbit-ears television tuned to a PBS program. I did not pay much attention until the narrator said one day the sun would blow up. What?! I shrieked.
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In an attempt to assure me, my father explained that the sun would not blow up for another many billions of years in the future. I started to cry. Don’t worry, he said, you will be dead by then. Dead? That’s how I learned about mortality.
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You will be long dead, he assured me. But then I began to worry about some future decedent of my great-great-great-great grandchildren. A little girl like me. Just going about her business. And then boom! Exploding sun.
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TL;DR You will be dead long before the sun blows up might not be the comforting words that a four-year- old needs to hear.
I might have gone with, by then life in other galaxies may be available. Think of the possibilities. Also, interjecting something about the possibility of an afterlife could have been helpful.
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