Then water will be condensed. Oceans will flood the sun, and for a short period it will resemble the earth in its present condition, though with the one important difference. The extinct sun, unlike our earth, will not receive life-giving heat from the outside, excepting the small amount of radiation from universal space and the heat generated by the fall of meteorites. The temperature fall will therefore be rapid, and the vanishing clouds of the attenuated atmosphere will not long check radiation. The ocean will become covered with a crust of ice. Then the carbonic acid will commence to condense, and will be precipitated as a light snow in the solar atmosphere. Finally, at a temperature of about -200° Cent., the gases of the atmosphere will be condensed, and new oceans, now principally of nitrogen, will be produced. Let the temperature sink another 20°, and the energy of the inrushing meteorites will just suffice to balance a further loss of heat by radiation. The solar atmosphere will then consist essentially of helium and hydrogen—the two gases which are most difficult to condense—and of some nitrogen. In this stage the heat loss of the sun will be almost imperceptible. Owing to the low thermal conductive power of the earth’s crust, there escapes through each square mile of this crust scarcely one-thousand-millionth part of the heat which the sun is radiating from an equal area of its surface. In future days, when the solar crust will have attained a thickness of 60 km. (40 miles), its loss of heat will be diminished to the same degree. The temperature on the surface of the sun may then still be some 50° or 60° above absolute zero, and volcanic eruptions will raise the temperature only for short periods and over small areas. Yet in the interior the temperature will still be at nearly the same actual intensity, something like several million degrees, and the compounds of infinite explosive energy will be stored up there as today. Like an immense dynamite magazine, the dark sun will float about in universal space without wasting much of its energy in the course of billions of years. Immutable, like a spore, it will retain its immense store of force until it is awakened by external forces into a new span of life similar to the old life. A slow shrinkage of the surface, due to the progressive loss of heat of the core and to the consequent contraction, will in the meanwhile have covered the sun with the wrinkles of old age.