Imagine you knew nothing of the human species. I hand you a photo of a child, say 8 years old. What can you say about that child’s future, biologically?  Not much. You can maybe measure their height, look at their skin and hair color and shape, the lengths of fingers and arms and such… basically make physical measurements and observations but there’s not much of a conclusion you can draw about their future. You lack knowledge of their past and importantly their context; you’ve only seen this one child, and the image only shows a moment, a tiny fraction of their lifespan. We have the same issue with the Sun. We’ve been observing the Sun for centuries, but this too is only a sliver of its existence, a thin slice showing what it’s like now . What of its future? There’s a way to figure that out. Going back to our first allegory, now imagine I show you a database with hundreds of millions of peoples’ photos in it, in toto ranging across the human lifespan. Not only that, you also have their age .…