y not wrote: “Stars not massive enough to go supernova, like the Sun, will expand into red giants, engulfing and destroying the nearer planets including Earth (in the case of the Solar system) before shrinking back to white dwarfs. If an inhabited planet lies within that radius, the destruction will happen before the explosion of a supernova in the vicinity. The star’s time ‘is up’ before that of the supernova.”
It is possible that the Sun could be in a “red giant” state for millions of years before another star in the “10,00 world systems’ blows up and destroys the whole system. Furthermore, another star can become a supernova and blow-up the whole system BEFORE the Earth becomes a red giant.
– These are minor details. The “big picture” does not change.
Furthermore, we cannot take everything scientists to say at the moment to be the “ultimate truth”. As I pointed out, their “world view” keeps changing with more data. It has changed drastically over even the past couple of hundred years.