What If Someone Suddenly Turned the Sun Off?

The What If? series from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) seeks to give serious answers to ridiculous theoretical questions. The most common question they receive, over and over, is "What would happen if the sun went out?" This is also a common question outside of the series, too. What they are actually asking is how long would it be before we all froze to death. The answer varies, because humans know how to keep warm up to a point. But we would lose our light, our food supplies, and pretty soon our orbit. Since those scenarios have been addressed all around the internet, Munroe and Reich decided to look at the bright side, as if there is one. The lack of a sun would actually solve some problems we have here on earth. Not that any of that makes up for freezing to death, but here you are anyway with a list of benefits from the sun ceasing to burn.


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Some of us are old enough to remember when all computer text was green ascii on a black background. We were jubilant when we finally got to look at something that reembled a real book or newspaper.
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Dark mode only saves energy when using OLED screens where a pixel emits its own light. In an LCD the light is emitted by a backlight and to get dark it needs to activate 100% blocking in a screening layer. It draws more energy than showing white, though not much. The only way to reduce energy in LCD is to turn down the backlight brightness.
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Ever been on call and had to look at your phone at say 3am after you've been asleep for a few hours? It's more than energy savings. Google (Android) gets it and I presume Apple does too. Not Microsoft though. The oblivious ant army marches on. . .
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