How humanity discovered we’re all made of ‘star stuff’
How humanity discovered we’re all made of ‘star stuff’
By Thomas Moynihan | Published: 2024-12-18 17:58:00 | Source: The Past – Big Think
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Each of us – physically and physiologically – is 13.8 billion years old. This is the age of the universe. It has taken all this time for our universe to form the elements and build the cumulative complexity that makes us who we are. It took the universe 13.8 billion years to create beings capable of realizing what they are Result of agglomeration This is long.
This is another way to understand one of Carl Sagan’s ideas The most famous sayings. In 1973, Sagan Announce don’t forget We are “made of star stuff.” By this he meant that the matter in our bodies is a byproduct of dead stars. we, Quite literallyIt is the dust of ancient stars.
But people didn’t always appreciate this. Far from it. Moreover, Sagan was not the first to claim that we are made of “astral stuff.” Debate has raged for centuries about whether our bodies are composed of the same components as the sun. This is the story of how we discovered that we descend from the chemical cauldrons that are the suns, and how this changed our sense of otherness. from and What we.
A seismic shift in worldview
As far back Early sixteenth centurythe Leading Swiss chemist Paracelsus He said confidently Our bodies are “not derived from celestial bodies.” The stars have nothing to do with us, He confirmed: Their matter does not bequeath to us any “property” or “essence.” Paracelsus went further, declaring that even if there had been no stars at all, human beings would have been born—and would continue to be born—without noticing any significant difference. He admitted that, of course, we need our sun for warmth and light. But “beyond that,” the distant stars “are neither part of us nor we of them.”
Paracelsus was not alone in this. the The dominant point of viewdating back to Aristotle, had long assumed that the Earth and other celestial bodies were separated not only by a gap in space, but by differences in all other attributes as well. The earthly and heavenly realms were seen as separate spheres of existence – governed by completely different laws and composed of different substances.
But in the decades following Paracelsus’ death in 1541, A revolution has begunHe combined these two spheres by proving that the heavenly and the terrestrial were subject to the same rules. This was thanks to Galileo and his telescope and the establishment of the modern scientific method. As Francis Bacon Summarize In 1612, the supposed “separation between” the heavenly and the terrestrial was proven to be a “fiction.” Bacon emphasized that the forces that shape things here are the same forces that move the orbits there.
This was a Seismic shift in worldviewThe dimensions of which are difficult for us to estimate today. Throughout the seventeenth century, meditators such as René Descartes He started announcing This means that we can conclude that “the matter of the heavens and the earth is one.” But even though the following century saw construction Telescopes are larger than ever before – To better spy on distant stars – There is no way to confirm this fact conclusively. For all we know, the sky could be made up of elements completely foreign to those on Earth.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the stars still seemed far away and unfamiliar enough that the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel could. Emotionless comparison To a “rash” staining the night sky.
similarly dismissive, Influential French polymath Auguste Comte asserted in 1835 that our species would do so never Verifying the elemental components of the sun. He boasted that even future generations would not be able to discover knowledge about the physical properties of bodies outside our solar system.
“We must carefully separate the idea of the solar system from the idea of the universe,” says Comte He continued gruffly“And always be certain that our only real interest is in the first.” For Comte, this was neither tragedy nor deprivation. “If knowledge of the starry sky were forbidden.” He explained“It’s not a real result for us.”
Inventor of words like “sociology“and”Altruism“Otherwise, the Comte was admirably overconfident. It is no exaggeration to say that this was – and remains – one of the worst predictions ever made about… The future of human investigation.
In 1859, just two years after the Count’s death, it became a domain Spectroscopy was established by Gustav Robert Kirchhoff and Robert Bensen. Use Light analysis Emitted and absorbed by things to ascertain their chemical composition and method Finally proven The stars are composed of the same elements that we find associated with earthly matter on Earth. This was thanks to the work he did Margaret and William Huggins From their own observatory In South London. They proved Paracelsus and Comte wrong with him.
In the following decades, scholars He started announcing That “the entire visible universe”—from “our central star” to the outer “nebulae”—“has been accessed by our chemistry, captured by our analysis, and the proof given that all matter is one.” Ninety-one years before Sagan said the same thing, in August 1882, French spectrograph Jules Janssen to make Claim: ““These stars are made of the same stuff we are made of.”
People found comfort in this. During a speech he gave in 1918, Canadian poet and physician Albert D. announced Watson believed that thanks to the spectroscope, “the highest qualities of our being” were revealed – hitherto invisible to us. “We are made of universal and divine ingredients.” Watson explained.
He saw this as useful: it means that we must begin to act accordingly, to rise to the station to which our “components” refer. If we are made of “universal” elements, then our “behaviour, ambitions and aspirations” must also take on a similar scope. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust It may still applyBut at least every passing life is a particle made of the same ashes as the stars.
Others felt the same. In 1923, Astronomer Harlow Harlow Shapley “Man, beast, rock, and star” are all part of the same physical family, she thought. “Modern astronomical discoveries” He explainedand confirmed the “uniformity of all chemical composition.”
“We ask no higher immortality than to be made of the same immortal matter as the rest of creation,” Shapley concluded.
Shapley repeated the same message six years later in an interview Making the cover to New York Times. It was accompanied by a stunning illustration depicting a human figure against a background of spiral galaxies and intermittent comets. The title was as follows: “The Astral Things That Are Man.” In terms of body makeup, it looked like us Star brothers.
It tells that Shapley used words like “immortality” and “immortality.” At that time, it was still an open question whether the universe itself was eternal. Evidence has not yet been collected to make a decisive decision in either direction. Assuming that the universe was eternal, as most scientists did at the time, it was also possible to believe that life itself never began: that living beings had always existed and would exist forever, scattered like dust motes in a deathless cosmic vortex.
But then, as the century went on, evidence began to accumulate suggesting that the universe itself — and thus matter as a whole — had a hot start. Scientists are also beginning to notice that if this is true, there must have been a time when life also – cosmologically speaking – did not exist anywhere.
During the 1940s, Russian scientist George Gamow developed theories explaining how the most abundant and lighter elements – hydrogen and helium – evolved. It was rigged At the fiery, explosive beginning of the universe. But our bodies are made up of Heavier and more complex items These include: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur.
fell to The stubborn English astronomer Fred Hoyle to reveal – during the 1940s and 1950s – how the heavier elements in our living universe were cooked inside dying stars: by fusing simpler nuclei into more complex arrangements, before… Blowing it Into space via the solar rattle, which is a supernova explosion.
In this way, the evolutionary lineage of all matter has been revealed. Hoyle revealed the processes by which heavier elements are built up from lighter ones, by the contraction and relaxation of dying stars. It is also through this, open Our secret link to some of the most powerful energy events in the universe.
Sons of stars
It turns out that we are not star brothers. Because we are made of elements Originally forged Within the aging suns, it is true to say We are their children. This is our genetic connection to the universe: our shared cosmic heritage, the ancient atomic chemistry of the universe.
Add a Spin Shakespeare To the idea, journalist George W. Gray – while contemplating Hoyle’s discoveries – pensive That we are “things like stars.” Gray continued: “The sense of kinship between the things of life and the things of the stars is inevitable,” and it touches “physicists” as much as it touches “ordinary sentimental people.”
Hence, this concept became common language of popular science. Only a few years before Sagan, the German writer Hoymar von Dittfurth frequent The phrase in his 1970 book Children of the universe. universe, Dietforth reflects“The entire Milky Way galaxy, with its hundreds of billions of suns, was used to create the familiar objects that surround us.”
“If some huge cosmic event had not occurred, there would be nothing in our everyday world today,” Ditforth marveled. That’s why, in a very literal sense, each of us is about 13.8 billion years old.
All of us are not like that only A product of events in our early childhood, which continue to shape the way we are today. Same link – From the present to the past – applies equally to the interconnected events leading up to the Big Bang. If it had not happened, or happened differently, we would not be here to contemplate today.
Throughout the ages, one of the oldest assumptions has been that the basic building blocks of our world are locked away from time. That is, that while things are Built Since matter, from mountains to apes, has ancestors and biographies—that is, it is born, develops, and decays—the atoms themselves suffer no such inconveniences. The elements were assumed eternal: unchangeable.
One of the deepest, most surprising, Discoveries of modern science – It has been revealed thanks to our investigation of things on the largest and smallest scales – that matter itself has a biography. That is, elements have a family history, where what is simpler sometimes becomes the origin of more complex things. The truth of common descent extends far beyond biology. When Sagan declared that we are “made of stellar matter,” he was contributing his share to this centuries-long effort: representing our collective, cumulative battle to figure out our place in the universe and our relationship to it. It turns out that this relationship is patriarchal in a deep sense. Our very atoms betray the hallmarks of our amniotic connection to this exploding, aging universe.
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