The star at the center of our solar system—you know, the sun, sol, Helios, good old Hyperion—truly is a wondrous thing. It can brew tea for suburban mothers or burn the ever-loving shit out of us equally easily. It doesn’t care whether or not our frail bodies or possessions are prepared to withstand the intensity of its solar radiation; it just beams out its death rays all the same. Charles Montgomery Burns once observed that since the beginning…