Five billion years from now, our sun will expand into a red giant. It will swell out and become huge, swallowing Mercury and Venus and, quite possibly, our own swirling planet. After another billion years or so, the red giant will shrink to a white dwarf. White dwarfs are some of the densest things known in our universe, apart from neutron stars and black holes.
White dwarf stars can live on for untold amounts of time. Tens or hundreds of billions of years—many times longer than our universe. When they end, so scientists suspect, they become what is known as a black dwarf.
A black dwarf is a star that emits no energy. There are no known black dwarf stars in our universe as of yet. This is one of many other predictions scientists make about the future, without really knowing whether that future will come to pass. We gather the data and feed it into computer simulations and then we make calculated guesses and say: maybe. We’ll see.
Humans won’t be around on Earth to test this theory one billion years from now, never mind five. Our main sequence star, our very own sun, will be 10% hotter in a billion years. 10% hotter is far from becoming a red giant but hot enough to ensure that our oceans will be boiled away. But if humanity has survived climate change (who knows?) and overthrown the billionaires (one can always hope!) and managed to spread to other planets by this time, it is possible that we might be able to see what happens next, when the expanded sun then shrinks.
The silicon—the signature of Earth’s rocky make-up—of our planet will be absorbed into our sun when it expands. Then, when the sun shrinks into a white dwarf, the silicon will exist as a remnant, a cool gaseous signature that astronomers will read when they look up at the sky. They’ll measure the light coming from our sun and see the telltale signature of silicon in that spectrum of light stretching out over billions of years.
Everything you think and feel and love. Everyone you think and feel and love. Everything that humanity has ever done and seen and felt and loved—it all ends up here. This is our future, and our destiny—a few faint marks in a beam of light that stretches forever through the cosmos.
It’s enough to make your head spin, isn’t it. Kind of like how we’re already spinning on our way through the stars.
I am knee-deep in the thick of writing these days. It is hard work and also it is the easiest work in the world. I feel so lucky, even as I come away from my desk exhausted every afternoon.
I’m reading a lot about physics and the history thereof, and most days I feel like I’m trying to push my tiny little Commodore 64 operating system of a brain through a world made for the latest, most sophisticated processors. Or trying to drive a steam engine through a space that’s made for planes.
I understand so little, I think, despairing. Anyone who reads this book is going to know I’m a fraud.
It helps when I remember that I am not actually writing a book about space. I am writing a book about grief, which is something I understand a little better.
The light that is emitted from stars, including white dwarfs, is composed of photons. Photons are elementary particles—this means they can’t be divided into smaller constituent parts, although some pockets of science have already been searching for ways that this could change.
Photons do not have mass, which allows them to careen through the universe as speedily as they do.
Thus far, we’ve seen no evidence that photons decay, which means they’re basically immortal.
The light that exploded out from the Big Bang and has existed from the beginning of time will continue to exist long after you and I and all our dreams are gone. Perhaps forever.
Protons, another kind of elementary particle, are part of another suite of particles that comprise humans and plants and animals and planets and minerals and all of the stuff that’s out there in the universe. Protons do have mass, which is why they cannot travel at the speed of light. Moving objects with mass at the speed of light requires an infinite source of energy, which we do not have.
Protons also do not decay, at least as far as we’ve observed. They merely regroup into different conglomerations and become other things.
Red giants, when they collapse into white dwarfs, do so in an explosion called a supernova. They eject their outer layers of gas and dust in what is known as a planetary nebula—because the ejection of this gas and dust seeds the materials of new planets and stars out into the universe.
Fun fact? Some of the heavy metals we need for the building blocks of life, like zinc, silver, tin, gold, mercury, lead and uranium, are only ever made in supernovae.
In other words: a star needs to die in order for these other things to come to be.
Thich Nhat Hanh says it like this: there is no death. There is only transformation.
Last week, the Canadian book deal for The Possible Universe, this space-y book about grief and grief-y book about space of mine, was announced. It all feels very official and scary now.
If all goes well, The Possible Universe will hit Canadian bookstore shelves in the Spring of 2026.
My agent and I are getting ready to send it out to publishers in the US and the UK next. Please cross your fingers for us! (Better yet: are you a US or UK publisher reading this Substack? Take a chance on me! I am a good promoter and can even promise to be fun at author parties! I come armed with good wit and terrible, wonderful puns. Also, I have other novels available to buy, thereby opening up the opportunity for true bang for your publishing buck! Why settle for one deal when you can have TWO?)
It probably sounds strange, doesn’t it, to be contemplating the prospect of one more book against the eventual demise (or transformation) of our planet.
Why bother, one might be pushed to think, if all of this work is eventually going to mean nothing? If all that we are will eventually just be a signature of lines agaisnt the light from one nondescript star in a nondescript corner of the universe?
Why bother caring at all, if this is our eventual end?
Well. Why not care, I guess, is my question. Why not care, and write, and love and laugh and cry and rage and wring every drop out of life that you can, while you’re at it?
Our photons have transpired to become us, for a time. Why not try as hard as we can to enjoy the experience and ask all of the questions? Why not try to push our tiny Commodore 64 brains to their limits?
Why not?
I find myself coming back to this question again and again now, when faced with joy and grief. I face them daily.
Why not?
Why not reach for joy in a burning world?
Why not try for joy whenever and wherever, even as we humans do terrible things to one another?
Why not look for joy everywhere you can?
Why not seize it, even in the tiniest of moments? Even when you’re overwhelmed with grief?
Reaching for joy is not a betrayal. Reaching for joy is a birthright. And sometimes we can’t do it, and sometimes (more often than not) the terrible state of the world prevents it, for a time. But when has the history of the world ever been any different? We have been living and loving and surviving and dying and doing terrible things to one another since humans evolved on the planet. None of that is going to change anytime soon.
We will human on this planet, and maybe civilization will succumb to climate change and the world will go on and become something else, give birth to other forms of life. Maybe we’ll survive climate change and move out to orbit other stars. Either way, in a few billion years we’ll become a gaseous signature in a beam of light as seen from a planet many light years away. That’s our future.
Why not make the most of this now, while we can? Why not see the world as a miracle precisely because it isn’t going to last forever, even as the protons that comprise it will?
The science tells us this truth: protons last forever and they also change, forever. They are constantly shifting and transforming into something else.
How will you let the knowledge of our stellar trajectory change you? You are also going to change forever. The you that is you and then the bones and the teeth that decay and become something else. On and on.
How will you let that knowledge sit inside of you, and open you up into the space of all-that-is?
Me: today, and tomorrow, and next week, and the day after that, I’ll let it pull me back to writing. I’ll let it link me, on some level I will never understand, to my beloved Jess. To the place where she waits, to the magic inherent in being here to type at all.
Life right now is very different from the life I once imagined. And also, it is every bit the life I once imagined. I am writing and breathing and giving in to the twin gods of joy and grief. I have said goodbye to so much, and in the process have been given so much that is unexpected and good. New family, new stars around which to orbit. New anxieties (!) and excitements to hold hand in hand.
I see her everywhere, the same way that we look for signatures in light. I see all those that you’ve loved and lost in you too.
Because of her, I am here, writing to you. You and me and all-that-is.
Small things and big things to hold today. But don’t worry.
I know you can do it.
Currently Reading: A Brief History of Time (have I mentioned that I broke my brain?)
Currently Watching: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Sam Reid as Lestat is my new favourite thing.
Currently Eating: This Gochugang Orzo with (Zucchini instead of Eggplant) Schnitzel from Sam Jones.
Currently Substacking: Another wonderful essay from Kate Brook—this one about gigantic September resolution lists! I love me a gigantic list of resolutions!
So excited for your book. Less so for the boiling of the seas.