The yellow-orange tholin haze above Titan's surface whirled around the chassis of a lighter-than-air research drone. A tiny carbon-fiber humanoid robot sat perched on its support structure, dangling his feet next to the drone's camera as it took pictures of the rocky surface below. The dirigible, designed to carry sampling probes and communication equipment, barely registered the stowaway's mass. Folded aramid-fiber wings fluttered on aluminum ribs on the bot's back as the breeze swept over the drone's chassis.

"Man, this place really does have atmosphere," Gavin whispered.

He snorted at his own bad joke.

It keeps out the cosmic radiation though. They have to live underground on Mars, like moles.

Gavin watched the haze roil beneath his tiny carbon-fiber feet. It wasn't really him of course. Gavin and his wife Lori were hurtling through the space between Earth and Saturn in a Goshawk Heavy Transport. The winged avatars through which they interacted with Titan's small colony would've only come up to his knee if they stood side-by-side. Nonetheless, six hour virtual reality workdays in the bubble box made the homunculus's carbon-fiber shell feel very much like skin.

Steady development in smartphone battery capacity and size had paved the way for the tiny twelve to fourteen hour lithium-ion battery nested in his back. The same was true of the dual micro-cameras that gave the homunculus crisp depth perception and picture, even in Titan's shrouded twilight.

Five billion years ago, our Sun condensed out of a cloud of gas and dust. Shortly after, planets coalesced out of the flattened nebula, and the strong winds of the young Sun blew away the remaining gas and dust. Moons were ejected, moons were captured. Cosmic debris careened through the solar system, causing chaos. After a time, everything settled. The planets cooled. Life blossomed.

Five billion years from now, our Sun will exhaust its supply of hydrogen. Its outer layers will swell and engulf Mercury, Venus, and Earth. The Sun’s core will be exposed and its outer layers will drift away, driven to fluoresce by X-rays emitted by the hot core but later invisible to our eyes. The core will cool until it too fades from view, living out the rest of its days as a black dwarf.

Our Sun is a middle-aged star in the suburbs of the Milky Way, a rather average spiral galaxy. While humans have come to see the Sun as a typical star, that’s really not quite true. Sun-like stars are much more common than the massive stars that end their lives as supernovae, leaving behind rapidly spinning neutron stars or black holes, but they still only make up a small fraction of the stars in the universe. The most common stars in the universe are all around us, but hidden, too dim to be seen with the naked eye.