We Are All Made Of Stars

"We are a way for the universe to know itself. 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," – Carl Sagan.

The thought that I, as well as the rest of everything I can see and touch, is made up of the elements of long passed stars leaves me with a boundless sense of wonder. Before I ever heard of such a theory, I thought Moby’s We Are All Made Of Stars was just a metaphor. It is only now that I begin to understand and embrace such a captivating hypothesis.

As I perdure to escape the abating hold of childhood stories that speak of creation and methodical origins, science is consistently providing a much more realistic allegory. The thought that the elements that realize my existence are rooted in the cosmos and were birthed in what I can only imagine were glorious spectacles of light and colour provides a sense of almost universal connectedness.

Big stars, made up of hydrogen and helium, supernova when their hydrogen sources deplete. They essentially die in a burst of bright light, which results in a cloud of dust and gas that is blasted throughout the solar system. One of the resulting elements just happened to be carbon, and so, voilà! (But, of course, there's billions of years between exploding stars and the resulting thinking, walking, talking homo sapiens who yearn to understand everything.)

As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, “Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”