What's the point of space? We can't go there

What's the point of space? We can't go there.

What's the point of this thread? We can't post anything insightful here.

How does something that big not turn into a black hole?

I'm not joking when I say that it doesn't collapse into a black hole because it's literally constantly exploding hard enough to fight the inward pull of gravity.
That's what stars are.

Neat, is there a limit to how big they can get?

Carl Sagan said something like Space is the Ocean and the Earth is the tidal pool where life first formed, so right now the "ocean" may be lifeless but in a billion years there will be whales and shit out there

The bigger it gets, the weaker the explosions get, so all stars are in a delicate state of balance where the force of gravity and the radiation pressure inside the core are pretty much equal and opposite.
Stars don't really grow much bigger over their lifetime unless weird shit happens, so how big they are is mostly dependent on what the composition of the nebula they formed in was like, and how much mass they've lost over their lifetime. Theoretically I guess there's an upper limit for the size of a star with an ideal composition that allows for the maximum possible radiation pressure from fusion, but I dunno dude.

After fusing heavy elements, its core will begin to produce iron, disrupting the balance of gravity and radiation in its core and resulting in a core collapse supernova.

Stars DO get much bigger over their lifetimes.
They're steady (on the main sequence) most of that time, but the Sun will eventually puff up into a red giant the size of the Earth's orbit. Then it will shrink down into a red dwarf.

That's size. Upper limit of mass is probably about 70 Sols or so. More massive stars "burn" faster and have shorter lifespans. That is, they pump out energy faster. Beyond a certain point, radiation pressure blows the outer layers off, reducing the mass. Look up "stellar evolution"

The upper-left to lower-right diagonal is the Main Sequence. The Sun sits just about in the middle of the diagram. Red giants are to the upper-right, red and white dwarves at lower-left. Note there are "empty" areas. Stars don't "jump" discontinuously from one spot to another but the changes are so quick (relative to their overall life) that we find very few stars in the middle of a transition.

The Sun is considered a G0 star. To locate it, draw a horizontal line across from the Luminosity =1 scale. It intersects the Main Sequence just a hair past the letter "G" on the bottom axis..

What ultimately determines if a sun evolves into a blue or red giant? Just size, mass, and temperature?

Interstellar flight's not impossible, just really really difficult and expensive. Forget Star Trek.
There are ideas for spacecraft which could reach 5 or even 10 percent of lightspeed (and come to a stop at the far end). A voyage between "neighboring" stars would required 50 or 100 years. You either send an entire colony (and expect your descendants to finish the trip) or hope some form of suspended animation/freezing is invented.

Who ever said space (or the universe. or life) had a point?

Mass. It (largely) controls the other two factors.

The Sun could never become a red giant. Insufficient mass.
For the same reason, it can never go nova and collapse into a neutron star or black hole.

CORRECTION: Can never become a BLUE giant. Typo.

but the sun is going to expand, right? maybe not full blown red giant but from what I understand the Sun's supposed to expand and swallow the Earth at some point

You mean it would just collapse into a dwarf? What if it's able to absorb some mass from a neighboring supernova?

Exactly. The sun will expand to the size of the Earth's orbit. Whether the world will be actually inside or just outside isn't certain (and, the difference would be of only academic interest to anyone still around then.)
I'd call that a Red Giant.

After the Red Giant stage comes the collapse.

Suppose a star went supernova within 10 lightyears of us. Not currently likely, but stars _do_ move and one massive enough to go bang! might approach someday. If the explosion totally destroyed the star, leaving not even a dwarf or neutron star, it would become an expanding gas shell around its original position. By the time it reached the Solar System, the star's mass would be distributed across the surface of a sphere 10 light years in radius! That is a LOT of area! The amount of mass which would actually hit the sun is trivial. Stars only exchange mass when they're gravitationally bound, orbiting each other.

When Krypton exploded it seems that half the mass of the planet fell to Earth in the form of pretty green rocks -- but that's not really realistic.

That makes sense. I thought the effects might be negligible.

>Krypton
Don't know what that is. Is that from Star Trek?

Superman. :)