We are Star Stuff
Illustration by ChatGPT Carl Sagan said, “We are star stuff.” No one else could have expressed a scientific idea so poetically. The statement is not just fine poetry but also a revelation about our ancestry. The person sitting next to you probably belonging to another religion, the dog roaming on the street, the tree yonder, a mountain, an ocean… all have a common ancestry. That’s what Sagan is telling us. In the beginning was hydrogen . The earliest universe was a remarkably simple place. After the Big Bang, there were essentially the lightest elements, mostly hydrogen and helium, with tiny amounts of lithium. There was no carbon to make life, no oxygen to fill our lungs, no calcium to make our bones, no iron for our blood. The universe had the raw materials, but not yet the extraordinary variety of things we know today. Then gravity began its patient work. Vast clouds of hydrogen and helium gathered together. They became denser and hotter until, eventually, the first star...
