Huey: The scientific connection between humans and stars

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If you don’t get out much or don’t listen to the news very often, you may not know about this recent almost shocking claim of some world-renowned scientists. I sure didn’t know about it. The most recent and astonishing proposition by the scientific community is that some of the atoms that make up life here on Earth, the ones that comprise the body, the skin, bones and teeth, can be traced back to stars that exploded billions of years ago in deep space, even before the dinosaurs roamed our countryside.

Those stars became unstable, then exploded and sent out particles of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, all the basic ingredients of life, screaming across the vastness of space, headed toward us. It all finally found its way here too, some of it survived the plunge down through our atmosphere at supersonic speeds, then settled on Earth. Then finally after a few million years, it calmed down and became a part of YOU!

Even though it took scientists thousands of years to realize it, stars are literally a part of us. Their ingredients were gas clouds that condensed, collapsed, then formed a new generation of stars, along with the planets that orbited them. Those millions of seemingly unimportant planets, Earth included, suddenly had all the necessary ingredients for life.

One scientific journal stated that even the calcium in our teeth came from stars that exploded themselves across the universe, and some of it happened millions of years before Earth even existed. Much of the calcium in the universe came from those explosions and found its way here to become a part of our teeth and bones.

Stars helped make us, and that fact right there actually IS the meaning of life, what you make of it. Stars gave us the start, now we have to continue it. When you look up at the night sky, you’re actually looking at part of your family. Always remember that our atoms came from that vast expanse and those atoms may even return back there someday, but more importantly, those stars are within us now. They are a part of our chemical makeup.

Look at your face in a mirror. Note the texture. Note the shape. You’re not only looking at an aging face, you’re also looking at parts of a billion-year-old star, and that’s not just sentimental romantics, it’s a fact. There are atoms in your body that traveled a billion light years to become a part of your body.

When you think about how things happened for us, it should not only amaze you, it should make you feel important, because those points of light in the sky are partly where you came from, those exploded stars that glistened brightly all those eons ago.

That makes you an integral cog in this universe, it’s a part of you, and that’s one of the things that people want in life, to feel like they’re a part of something. People need to feel needed and be relevant, like they’re a participant in some sort of spectacular cosmic paradox.

That’s what people become when they finally realize who they are. Just by being alive, you’re important. You matter, and your matter matters. As the old Joni Mitchell song goes: We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon. We actually ARE! Yeah I know Crosby Stills and Nash recorded it, but SHE wrote it.

It was just a song to me back then, but those words make more sense today than they did when I was young, because she wasn’t just being aloof and mystical when she wrote that song. She was stating scientific fact, but judging by the gaggle of drugs she did during that era, most of the time she didn’t even know she was alive.

We ARE made of stardust, and those heavy elements in our bodies are proof of it. Those elements were forged in the bowels of stars that were millions of light years away, then were dispersed out into the universe through gigantic supernova explosions, which are stars that are dying. But those dying stars helped form our cells, making us and our galaxy actual products of some long-winded stellar evolution. It’s true. Some of the stars that died actually created many of the elements that gave us life.