system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are we staring into a celestial cemetery?

Do we have a way of knowing if any of the stars we see are still burning? Or are we staring into a celestial cemetery?
gpt
When you look up at the sky at night you see only nearby stars. The stars that are visible are between around 4 000 and 5 000 lightyears away. Beyond that distance they become too faint to see.

A good way at estimating the chance of the stars being dead is by comparing this distance to a Star's lifetime, which is at least tens of millions of years and in most cases more like ten billion years. This gives us the boring answer; those stars are still burning.

For a useful comparison to life on Earth, if we take a rough average 1000 lightyear distance and 1 billion year lifespan then the light travel time is 1 millionth of their life expectancy. This means, if you chose randomly, a 1/1 000 000 chance of the star being dead. For a human who lives 80 years that same ratio is about 45 minutes. You are not likely to die in the next 45 minutes.

In fact, since  only about 5 000-10 000 stars are even visible then statistically it is unlikely that even 1 of them has died in the light travel time, let alone a significant number of them.

Lastly, stars do not die randomly. We have a very good idea about how stars evolve and when they will die. So, if we see a young star a few thousand or million light years away we know it is still there. 

Betelgeuse is a very famous star (it is the red star at the top-left of Orion if you know your constellations), some astronomers think Betelgeuse is on it's way out, that it is reaching the end of it's life. Truth be told, we can't predict exactly when it will die but it could be soon. Unfortunately, by soon we mean the next few million years. (Betelgeuse is 600 lightyears away).