The past 20 years has seen a revolution in stellar astrophysics driven by high precision data, high cadence data for millions of stars from exoplanet hunting telescopes such as Kepler and TESS. Surveys like ZTF, ASAS-SN, and the upcoming Rubin Observatory push us to explore billions of stars with sparse time series over many years. In this talk I will discuss the exciting range of projects from my group that explores stellar variability on timescales from minutes to decades. For example, individual stellar flare events last minutes to hours. However on the Sun we know their occurrence rate can vary by a factor of 100 over the 11-year Solar Cycle. Long duration monitoring can reveal shifts in binary star configurations, detect stellar mergers, and even find rare planetesimal impacts. We have also been developing a growing number of projects that extend methods in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence from traditional radio frequencies into these large optical surveys.