<So, one of the defining features of the Simulant Future is the purple, burnt out Sun, our Sun.
So how the flying -blam!- did THIS happen? How EXACTLY did our Sun burn out? Let's see if we can answer that question.
Let's take into account the history of our Sun in this game. In the Simulant Past, the Sun actually appears smaller and brighter.
However, this could be because we are in a different area. Going into the present or future we see none of the structures in the past. We can ignore this. However, the Present Lighthouse and Future Lighthouse ARE the same area, so the Sun should be the same size... right?
No. The Sun in the Simulant Future is actually BIGGER than the Sun currently. It doesn't look like much, but unlike the present, you can't take a screenshot of the Future Sun and have it fit in frame.
Now let's analyze how stars burn out in real life. During the natural life cycle of some stars, they will begin to grow larger into red giants, eventually burning out and then exploding into beautiful supernovas.
After the supernova, stars are usually left in the White Dwarf stage, where they eventually burn out fully into Black Dwarfs, which is a theoretical concept that takes actual billions and billions of years to happen.
Given the size of the Sun in the Simulant Future, it clearly did not supernova. So we can eliminate the White Dwarf/Black Dwarf scenario. We can also eliminate Brown Dwarfs because even though it supposedly looks similar to the Future Sun, they aren't much bigger than Jupiter.
So the way our Sun burned out doesn't seem to be from natural processes, unless there's one I'm missing. Wait hold on... here let me discuss this before figuring out how things fail...
However, there may be a key to answering this whole thing, and that key is the Almighty. The Almighty is a star-destroying space station that connects itself to the core of a star and starts eating away at its magnetic field before severing the connection and teleporting to safety, leaving the star to go supernova.
Still, it leads to a supernova... HOWEVER, that result comes from a finished job. The Almighty did NOT finish the job on our Sun. It's still connected, but it isn't eating away at the field... anymore. I'm pretty sure it still got some, and there lies our problem. In the first cutscene we see it, it's attacking another star similar to our own. After it's done, the thing rapidly burned out and shrunk before exploding.
How would our Sun react with a half-finished job and how does it end up purple, bigger, and burnt out?
Enter the Supernova Imposter and Failed Supernova.
An Imposter is a stellar explosion that does NOT destroy the base star. The only one that made headlines later exploded fully two years later. However, I don't believe anyone mentioned that it lost anything. So, it's possible that our Sun released a shit ton of energy, but never went supernova. So that means everything in the system is still dead (unless you're Vex or acausal... maybe?) and it's possible that the Sun may still explode later down the road.
A Failed Supernova is a star that attempts to go supernova but the core collapses immediately into a black hole. This one I'm a little on the fence about. For one thing, it's only happened to massive stars, which our Sun isn't. Another thing, the future Sun isn't a black hole.
So I now come with a couple theories.
1. The Simulant Future is in the FAR FAR future where the Sun was replaced with another star that just died.
2. The Almighty gets destroyed, but because its job was half-assed, our Sun only gave a half-assed Supernova, expanding and releasing a ton of energy, killing all life in the system and left a bit bigger than it was before. This makes sense to me because the Almighty doesn't exist in the Simulant Future.
Leave your thoughts on this post below because I can't be bothered to do more than an hour's worth of half-baked research.>
[spoiler]<I realize now my half-baked research was in fact, half-assed.>[/spoiler]
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I think that the best way to dissect this question is to tackle the most important fact about it. The future we see is a [i]simulation[/i]. A construct of Vex design based on their understanding of the Universe. I can't say with certainty, but it's entirely possible that the Vex simply don't know how a star functions on a micro level. Perhaps the Vex have been too focused on their conversion mission to bother with gathering proper data on Sol. Perhaps they don't possess any long range observational tools and rely on close range analyses for complex comprehension, and given that radiolarium likely has a boiling point before ten thousand degrees, the Vex Collective likely couldn't gather any serviceable data. It might even be possible that the Vex are unable to simulate a star just on its own. It might seem like celestial bodies would be no sweat for their Planet Minds to grasp, but the Vex also struggle with simulating a Submind AI as well as the Hive's transformative morphs. These things aren't exactly complex in nature and are in no way paracausal, but for some reason, they don't click with their computations. Regardless, if the Vex don't fully understand the intricacies of a star's life cycle, they they wouldn't be able to accurately simulate one if it were to die.