Here’s a moving short video by filmmaker Mischa Rozema. The video portrays the end of our world… the expansion of our Sun into a cool but immensely large red giant star that will consume the inner planets Mercury and Venus, and possibly our own planet as a tiny spacecraft– Voyager 1– continues on its perpetual journey through interstellar space carrying a message from mankind.
As this video shows, the atoms that make up everything you know… your friends, your home, your own body, will in 5 billion years vaporize and return to space to be recycled into new stars and planets… and perhaps intelligent beings like ourselves.
This is nature’s ultimate recycling program, because much of the atomic material in our world was created in the furnace of long-gone stars that forged hydrogen and helium into carbon and iron and calcium and gold that will one day return into the spiral arms of our galaxy.
You can see hundreds of red giant stars in the night sky where this exact scenario plays out before your eyes in other star systems, and perhaps for other worlds which once had life.
The night sky is full of drama and contains more stories and histories that anyone could every hope to read or understand.