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This makes me wonder, how many sparks of life and ancient civilizations have been wiped from the universe by the birth and death of stars. How many supernovae have violently ripped them from existence. How many rogue stars have cooked them to molten slag. What a small and fragile thing humanity is in the face of these forces.

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People pointed to Asimov's Last Question, I'll point you to Clarke's The Star:

https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf

I reread this most years over the Holidays.

It is a beautiful Christmas story.

And that's not including the ones whose planets destroyed them, or where they destroyed themselves. Or the ones that became space-faring and were wiped out by others/space/whatever.

The odds of surviving on any scale seem pretty infinitesimal. Common sense would dictate we focus on surviving external forces but instead we hate each other over our differences.

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