Your Sun is Dying?

Sunshine

Fr dear Fr: I have just watched a Hollywood movie about a final space mission to the Sun in which the chief humans endeavour to fire up a dying sun by ramming a huge spaceship into it and igniting a series of nuclear reactions inside the star, obviously this is projected into the future when the star is declining and dying. Is this feasible?

I had a dialogue not long ago with Gg, a fierce defender of the green lobby in which I asked the protagonista about the human fonts of climate change as per the dominant strain of climate thinking, and this movie came up, with snorts from the girl herself, who was mouthing throughout the encounter Code Red for Earth, Code Red for Earth, ostensibly because of too hot a sun, too hot a star in the vicinity. Sunshine the Movie was on her lips - but it runs contrary to current thinking and the idea now dominant that the warming up of the planet is taking place due to human emissions of greenhouse gases and the like, CO2 being a major culprit as produced by human industry and human pollution on the planet surface.

Gg pointed out that the sun our nearest star is only 93m miles from the atmosphere of earth, that there were 620 wildfires in August in Siberia alone last summer during the month of August 2021, that temperatures reached a record 46 degrees in parts of Italy last summer, and a record 50 degrees Centigrade in parts of California last summer, and so on and so on. The ice caps are melting too, the ice in the Arctic North Pole is much thinner than before, as recounted by adventurers like Adrian Hayes and so on. Billionaires like Al Gore have explained why we need to reduce carbon footprints and so on. The evidence for global warming is overwhelming, she expostulated. Sunshine the Movie simply could never happen, she rounded off, sounded off, though suddenly her voice sounded thinner and for a few seconds she stuttered and faltered. Gg the Great suddenly silenced. And so it continued by day and by night. Marshalling the stats, crunching the numbers, and so on. Sunshine the Movie was simply a logical impossibility - it remained just science fiction. If anything the opposite might be true. And that is when a little light bulb suddenly went on in the girl's brain - she stopped and began to think, it might be true to say that much of the global warming might well be the product of an expanding growing sun, and not a cooling dying sun.

The words of the movie which rang out at the time, "your sun is dying" suddenly did not sound very convincing for her, but a cosmological reason for global warming might well be produced, she conceded. After all, a new thinking about stars is that they are more organic than once thought - Just as our generation and our time have seen the death of the grass of Logical Positivism, once such a strong force in western philosophy and emanating out of Oxbridge, so too the older philosophy of Simple Term Empiricism has had its day, thanks to philosophy books such as Post Growth by Tim Jackson and Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, when it was all regarded simply as a static object in the starry sky, in sum it was now felt that those suns and stars expand and contract and grow and reduce just like any other living organism. A philosophy issue, slowly being taken out of the hands of experimental scientists and their Dr Fauci animal victims like the new scandals of the puppies of Tunisia. We broke up and she promised to ponder on it all. She would report into the Glasgow summit soon about this new theory from Hollywood. A new factor had been discovered for it all, she admitted, time needed to think about this. So while the movie up above produced a new wave of thinking in a climate activist, the precise contours of the movie seem to be unlikely at the moment, she felt. Yet Hollywood is always better researched than many people often assume - if the sun is organic, it might yet be possible to think about such a scenario, certainly the opposite one of a growing expanding sun is just as feasible. Suddenly for our dear little friend from the north, all the talk about reducing carbon footprints seemed less urgent, less absolute, less cataclysmic - even she breathed a sigh of relief. It might yet be cosmological, this phase. Yes, carbon warming was a factor, and China still produced 27% of total earth carbon emissions from her heavy industries, and these footprints would have to be reduced in time anyway, but a single comprehensive theory of carbon emissions was now not so convincing - there was time to breathe. Time to live. We could now live a little. Gg withdrew from the dialogue a different person, now not so traumatised. The new theory was working on her brain. Something could be done. She was thinking again - not so dogmatique about an environmental feature. Hollywood might yet be right, if the sun was expanding it might also contract too, it might yet be the beginning of the dying phase that we could witness in our lifetimes. Time. Gg suddenly thought, and thought again. Science fiction is like that, it can accomplish bold new turns in human thinking. Let us be honest - without science fiction, where would we be, where would western philosophy be - one astronaut and me included too has reported that he would never have trained and embarked on a mission into space without the books of Perry Rhodan, his personal bible. So green awareness to sun awareness?