system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
This might sound like a stupid question, but was the sky pitch black eons ago?

I’m new to this sub and I was curious, since I had nothing to answer this question with other than my own headcanon. So this might actually have a short answer than expected. So light takes a super long time to travel right? Since what we’re seeing up there (outside of the solar system) are dead or dying stars and the info hasn’t reached our eyes yet. So was there a time when no light from outside the solar system had reached the earth, making the sky pitch black at night save for the sun?
gpt
Within the galaxy, the light travel times are actually quite short. The whole Milky Way is only about 100,000 light years across, and we're about 30,000 light years to the centre. But most of the stars you can see in the night sky are less than 1,000 light years away, and many are less than 100 light years away. It takes us about 200 million years to orbit the galaxy. The shortest lived massive stars live for millions of years, medium ones live for billions of years, and long-lived low-mass stars live for trillions of years. A molecular cloud will form collapse into stars, and then be blown away by those stars, over a period of 10s of millions of years or so.

Stars form and move so slowly compared to the light delay time that we're pretty much seeing every star in the night sky as it is now, except for small variations. Except for a few extreme objects, almost every star you see at night is still alive, and unchanged from what you see.

The Sun was also not the first star in the galaxy. There were a couple of generations of stars first. So once the Earth formed, the light from other stars was already all around, and the first night of the primordial Earth would have been a starry night (if the atmosphere was clear).