(The Lifetimes Spectrum.)

Among the stars in our galaxy and in other galaxies are hot blue stars that burn their fuel with prodigious rapidity and exhaust it in anly a few million years. Then they explode as giant supernovae and leave behind only a neutron star or a black hole. There are other stars af medium size and brightness, yellow like our Sun, that conserve their energy a bit more and last for billions of years. Their end is less spectacular; they expand to a red giant and then shrink to a white dwarf. And then there are even less massive, less brilliant stars, the brown dwarfs, that barely carry on thermonuclear reactions at all and so last almost forever.

Among the species that are living or have lived on the Earth, there are some that are still here though they originated in pre-Cambrian times, like the cyanobacteria (blue-green algae); they are extremely stable and will last as long as there is life on Earth. Then there are some species that persist for long times, such as cockroaches for 500 million years (and still going strong), and dinosaurs (100 million years and now extinct). And finally, there are glory-bound profligates like Homo sapiens, here a mere 50,000 years as a species and 4 to 5 million years as the genus Homo, and about to go under. A brilliant blue dazzling star, swallowed by the Black Hole of eternity.