system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How is lightning hotter than the surface of the sun?

And why doesn't it cause more damage to the surrounding area if it's that hot?
gpt
Of course the sun is hot, but the reason it is able to provide warmth from so far away is less because it has an extremely high temperature so much as that it is extremely large and puts out a tremendous amount of heat. 

A candle, for example, burns at 1000 degrees C, but it doesn't hurt much to lick ones finger and put on the flame with a pinch. That's because it doesn't matter if something is *hot* if it can't transfer a lot of *heat*. In comparison, a cup of coffee at 100 degrees C can very badly burn your finger, even though it is far less hot. Similarly lightening produces a very high temperature gas, but ultimately doesn't produce a tremendous amount of heat. Well, it does provide enough heat to kill people and cause fires, but nowhere near the amount provided by the sun. 

Temperature is a way of describing the average kinetic energy of a particle in a thing. As a result you can have just a few particles with a very high temperature, but a very low ability to provide *heat*, ie a very small amount of total energy available to c be transferred. The sun is very very large, and as a result is able to radiate out a tremendous amount of energy in the form of photons, just as the cup of coffee is able to transfer enough energy into your finger to give you a burn, while the hotter candle doesn't burn you when you snuff it out because there isn't a large total amount of energy for it to transfer into your finger. Generally hot things with a large amount of mass have a large amount of energy to transfer, while things with a small amount of mass (like the gas in a lightening strike) don't have as much energy to transfer, despite being very hot.