For dramatic emphasis I consider the white dwarf as an "ember" here, but TIL that the sun is considered to have around 5 billion years left. I find that a bit heartening because if Humanity goes extinct at least there'll be enough time for life to evolve another intelligent species.

I think we needed to do SOMETHING. The way I see it, in a billion years sol will be dust and embers and there's a 50/50 chance that the voyager may be the only thing that survived it.

Planet killers are pretty easy to catch, though. Large bodies like that reflect more light. They've been mapped out and a planet killer is less that 1 in 12 billion chance in the next 100 years. The gap we have right now is bodies around 80-180M which would impact with the force of a few nuclear bombs, but are not enough to end civilization. It wouldn't be great if one of those hit, but it wouldn't end humanity. That's why DART was so important, it showed that we can give bodies in that range a pretty good shove in a short period of time.

https://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-list
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-very-real-effort-to-track-killer-asteroids-and-comets-180979206/