The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Until yesterday, a good friend of mine was under the impression that the sun was going to explode in "a couple thousand years." At first I thought that this was an assumption that she'd never really thought about seriously, but apparently she had indeed thought about it occasionally. She was sad for her distant progeny, doomed to a fiery death.
She was moderately relieved to find out that humanity had millions of times longer than she had previously believed.
I envy you being the one to tell someone that!
Did you explain that the Sun was a miasma of incandescent plasma?