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The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded.
And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.
It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics:
You are all stardust.
You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded,
because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron,
all the things that matter for evolution -
weren’t created at the beginning of time.
They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars,
and the only way they could get into your body
is if those stars were kind enough to explode.
So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here.
The knowledge
that the atoms that comprise life on Earth
the atoms that make up the human body
are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core
under extreme temperatures and pressures.
These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years.
They collapsed and then exploded,
scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy.
Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.
These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse,
form the next generation of solar systems
stars with orbiting planets.
And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.
So when I look up at the night sky,
and I know that yes, we are part of this universe,
we are in this universe,
but perhaps more important than both of those facts
is that the universe is in us.
When I reflect on that fact,
I look up
— many people feel small, cause they're small and the universe is big.
But I feel big
because my atoms came from those stars.
There’s a level of connectivity.
That’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected.
You want to feel relevant.
You want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on and activities and events around you.
That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.
Once we overcome our fear of being tiny,
we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome universe that utterly dwarfs
— in time, in space and in potential —
the tidy, anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big ***,
and plumb the fine structure of matter.
We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star.
We read the genetic language in which is written
the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth.
We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins,
and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects.
We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death.
We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions.
We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half.
We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars.
We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments,
to be proud that our species has been able to see so far,
and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.
The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean.
On this shore, we've learned most of what we know.
Recently, we've waded a little way out,
maybe ankle-deep,
and the water seems inviting.
Some part of our being knows this is where we came from.
We long to return,
and we can,
because the cosmos is also within us.
We're made of star stuff.
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.