✍🏻 Stoked Smondays #2: Our Sun Is Dying
A newsletter that you can read on a lazy Sunday but actually preps you up for the much anticipated Monday. Not literally.
Hello people,
I know the subject line is a bit depressing but you won’t have to worry about it - at least for the next 4-5 billion years (more about this later).
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. ❤️
I surely did. One of my friend’s friends was sweet enough to host a party at her place.
We played poker and I ended up winning a total of ₹1,20,000! Crazy right? 🤯
Just kidding - it was ₹120 but it was pretty fun! Poker is only fun when you pool in real money. The more the buy-in amount the more are the levels of excitement, greed and fear.
Anyways, I was supposed to release this edition of Stoked Smondays yesterday but then I had a guest who paid a visit to me in the morning and refused to leave until evening.
No matter what - he was adamantly staying back.
Tried convincing him to give me some “me” time.
But no.
He was pretty stubborn.
Just in case you’re wondering who this asshole was - it was Mr Procrastinator.
I’m sure you have one too, sticking up your alley, refusing to leave.
Since then I have been so busy serving him that I never got a chance to start this piece.
Thankfully, at around 6 in the evening, Ms Shame (Oh! You know her too? 😋) started paying a visit - just to check how am I doing.
Moreover, to check how is it that I am living with myself?
And that too after promising that I’ll be releasing a newsletter every Sunday?
Hats off to her resilience.
Even after multiple on-the-face rejections - she kept coming.
She knew she couldn’t give up so easily. Not on me.
It was her repeated visits that finally forced me to book a one-way ticket for Mr P to Tomorrowland and fire up this post at 10 PM.
So here’s edition #2 of Stoked Smondays where I pen down my thoughts on the content I consumed during the week.
Tip: Go through the entire newsletter in a go and then pick out what you'd want to read/watch. That way you wouldn't miss out on anything fun that might be waiting for you in the latter parts of this newsletter.
Also, it helps improve my page's average session duration. (I'm a digital marketer to the core. 🙂🙃)
🌎 One Life
Here's a not-so Fun fact:
Our Sun is dying.
Before you ask why the fuck, you need to understand how our sun came into existence.
So let me put on my prof specs and try to explain this to you in the simplest way I have been able to comprehend.
Science nerds, you can rip me in the comments: it will increase my engagement rate. 🙂🙃
Imagine you're standing on top of this fleet of staircases.
You look up into the galaxy and find a couple of gases like Hydrogen and helium floating around in the left corner.
Since no one is hired to clean the galaxy, there are clouds of dust, a.k.a dead stars floating around on the right corner.
Suddenly a wave of energy storms in, (don’t ask me from where) forcing dust and gases to clash.
This clash leads to the formation of a hot whirlwind called Solar Nebula.
The whirlwind grows so large in size, mass and volume that it cannot withstand its weight anymore and starts collapsing due to gravity.
But wait, something is brewing up inside this whirlwind.
The pressure inside Nebula gets so high that the temperature starts shooting up. As a result, hydrogen starts losing its atoms slowly and goes crazy.
These atoms start fusing with helium atoms, leading to a release of heaps of energy.
Energy - so massive that it harnesses the power to counter the intense pressure of gravity, forcing Nebula to flatten into a disk.
This fusion that took place, happened at the centre of the Solar Nebula, about 4.5 billion years ago - forming the sun. 🌞
As a result of this fusion, our sun is able to happily burn 600 million tonnes of hydrogen per second in its core and can continue to do so for the next 5 billion years while countering gravity.
The Sun is approximately halfway through this hydrogen-burning phase now, so it’s OK, things aren’t going to change for a long time yet.
But what happens then? What happens in 4-5 billion years when the supply of hydrogen runs out in the core?
As per Sansaar ka Niyam - death is the only truth of life. And sadly, this holds true for our glowing buddy.
Although our Sun isn’t massive enough to entertain the thought of going out in a blaze of supernova glory, it will still go through an exciting, yet terrifying death.
After evolving through the hydrogen-burning phase, the Sun will puff up into a huge red giant star as the hydrogen fuel becomes scarce, expanding 200 times the size it is now, probably swallowing the Earth.
Helium, which slowly won’t have any hydrogen to fuse to - will go on to fuse into heavier elements like oxygen - in and around the core.
However, this fusion with heavier elements wouldn’t be powerful enough to produce the amount of energy needed to put a fight with gravity. This will cause forces of gravity to completely take over.
Once things calm down, a small sparkling jewel of a white dwarf star will remain.
This tiny remnant will have a mass of around half that of our present Sun but will be the size of the Earth.
But don't worry - by then, a lot of such reactions would have taken place in our galaxy, that humanity wouldn't be alive to witness the death of our sun.
Or thanks to Elon, we'll be off to some other planet laughing at the amount of crazy shit the humans on earth had to go through.
Anyways, the point of this entire story is that -
There's only one life.
For all of us.
If you want to read more about the sun and his about-to-come tragic death, you can head here, here, here and here.
📜 Articles:
#1. Helion: A Fusion power company
If you think about it - for our Sun to have kept on glowing for 4.6 billion years now, imagine the amount of energy the core would be generating every second?
4.26 million metric tons per second! (Source)
What if we could harness the same power to produce electricity?
This is what the good guys at Helion are up to.
Helion Energy, Inc. is a fusion research company based out of the U.S. committed to creating zero-carbon electricity from fusion - the same process our sun and other stars use to make energy.
They recently secured funding of $500 million from leading investors along with an additional $1.7 billion of commitments tied to specific milestones.
There are not a lot of companies out there doing what Helion is promising it will do. I recently started reading about them and seems like it will be interesting to see how they shape our energy space considering climate change is a major concern lingering over humanity.
#2. How to be successful - Sam Altman
Note: This is unlike any other self-help article or book you’ll find on the shelves.
This doesn’t have any 5-step formula or proven systems to help you achieve success.
Instead, Sam outlines 13 simple thoughts (read again: thoughts) - that can disproportionately increase your chances of being successful.
Sam is the former president of Y-Combinator - one of the best early-stage startup VCs on the planet. He currently heads Open AI and acts as an executive chairman at Helion Energy, Inc.
Here’s an excerpt from the read that I loved and intend to follow:
8. Be bold
I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.
If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.
If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don’t second guess it.
Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.
💻 Website
If you’re a marketeer, designer or student wanting to understand why we purchase what we purchase - then this is the website you should keep a tab on.
Growth.design is a wonderful collection of UX case studies outlining digital user experiences of leading brands in the world.
They also have a section on cognitive biases which talks about why we behave the way we do and how we can use this information to build user flows that can lead to higher acquisitions and retention.
You can start with this case study: How Tinder Converts 8% Of Singles Into Customers In Less Than 15 Minutes.
🎥 Video
How much Money did I make in 2021? By Ankur Warikoo
This video is a testament to the fact that patience and consistency compound.
I remember attending Ankur’s first-ever online session in 2020. During the end of it, he almost burst into tears talking about his financial situation and how he had only 5 months of runway left.
Fast forward to 2021 - he now sits on 3+ million following across all networks with his brand generating revenue of 12+ crores this year!
It’s insane how far he has come in just one year.
I’d highly recommend you to go through this video - if possible with your parents - because there’s an important message at the end of it.
🙇🏻 Course
#1. Marketing Analytics: How to Create an Effective Measurement Plan?
If you’re heavily into marketing analytics and frequently use Google Analytics (GA), then you will hi-five me when I say this “GA4 has fucked it up.”
Now, that is not at all true because GA4 is an advanced and a better version of Google’s Universal Analytics in terms of data & insights.
However, it seems like a tool that’s made way harder for marketers to comprehend. There’s a lot of hate on the internet for GA4 and is expected because the whole UI is quite confusing.
But that being said, you can either crib about it or try to learn about it.
And this is my first step towards learning GA4.
This course by Lachezar Arabadzhiev (don’t try to pronounce it - you won’t be able to) where he starts with the importance of marketing analytics followed by a part two - where he specifically walks you through GA4.
It’s an introductory course - so don’t expect to become an expert at the end of it. It’s a good start if you’re planning to get deep into marketing analytics.
🦜 Tweet:
Just going to put this tweet here with a term you should Google: Quantitative Easing.
Your fear of looking stupid is wasting your time.
🙇🏻 Person To Follow On Twitter:
I came across his tweet in the mid of this year and have been a fan since. He runs a SaaS startup called - OneUp which generates about $60k/month, equivalent to ₹45.2 lakhs in MRR (monthly recurring revenue).
The best part? OneUp is a 2-member company.
Davis heads marketing and product and has a technical co-founder who lives in Bangalore to whom he got introduced via an online platform called IndieHackers.
What I love about Davis is his authenticity and transparency about his journey of building this startup.
You should follow him if you’re into SaaS, Content Marketing or just startups.
That’s it for this edition folks! Hope you have an amazing Smonday. See you next week. 🧗🏻♂️
If you have any feedback, suggestions, tips, advice, thoughts - anything you’d like to share - feel free to comment. Or you can reply to this email.
Great article and the point of the whole story (although you might have to convince the ones who don't believe there is only one life xP) ! But as far as my knowledge, when the sun becomes a red giant (which doesn't happen for another 5 billion years!), It won't swallow Earth. It will reach Earth and our pale blue dot will actually look more like a solar spot near the bloated Sun.