Stuff only burns for so long. We might learn more about the geometry of space and that there is more out there at greater distances where maybe even other Big bangs are possible but there is a certain maximum amount of time that a star can exist.

Over the time scales of the life of a proton the maximum variability in the amount of time a star can burn is a rounding error against the scale of numbers needed to express the amount of time it takes for hawking radiation to reduce black holes to ultra long wavelengths of infrared radiation.

I agree with what you’re saying, and I should have been more clear.

I’m not saying you have to send them money, but if you do let money leave your wallet, we should be trying to make sure it gets to a deserving party. I think in general, we should avoid giving money to extractive industries that don’t add value and I’m encouraging you to error on the side of sending that money directly to the artist/laborers and cutting out literally everybody else.

I agree with you in that no one needs to be sending money to Metallica.

If you send the artist money in the form of a check or a donation more of that money goes to the person who produces the thing.

It’s not possible to reach 100%, but every little bit of your dollar you ensure enters the pocket of a person who worked for a living is one less bit of that dollar that ends up in the hands of a leech or a parasite.

Giving Spotify or Google or Apple or whoever has inserted themselves into the system to absorb money for something that they don’t pay for is fundamentally not healthy for any part of the ecosystem of art.