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 stars were born.

And the stars became cosmic factories.

Inside their immense furnaces, hydrogen was transformed into helium and, in massive stars, increasingly heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, neon, silicon, and iron.

The elements that would one day become planets, rocks, oceans, trees, animals and human beings were being manufactured inside stars.

We did not begin on Earth, in other words. Parts of us began inside stars. “We are star stuff.”

We are the ashes of dead stars

Stars do not live forever.

Massive stars eventually use up the fuel that powers them and die spectacularly, sometimes exploding as supernovae. In these violent deaths, many of the elements forged inside them are scattered into space.

The debris from ancient stars became the raw material for new stars and planets. About 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun and the planets of the solar system emerged from such a cloud of cosmic material.

The Earth was formed from the same ancient stuff.

Chemistry became biology on our tiny planet, unlike on most others.

Molecules became more complex. Life appeared. It evolved. Cells became organisms. Organisms diversified. Over immense stretches of time came plants and animals, fish and reptiles, mammals and primates.

Eventually, after billions of years of cosmic and biological history, a creature appeared that could look at the night sky and ask: Where did I come from? – without knowing that we came from those stars.

The atoms in our bodies were once scattered through the universe. Some were forged in stars that died long before the Earth existed. Those atoms eventually became part of our bodies. And now those atoms can think. And imagine.

And we thought up gods and imagined heavens.

We also learnt to love. But we tended to love our gods more and fellow humans less.

We grew up civilisationally and wrote poems, composed music, built telescope and formulated theories.

When we look at the stars, now, we are not looking at something completely alien and distant. We are looking at our ancestors.

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam

The carbon in an Indian’s body and the carbon in an American’s body have the same cosmic ancestry. The oxygen in a Muslim’s lungs and the oxygen in a Hindu’s lungs do not know any difference. The calcium in Swami Nithyanada’s bones is chemically the same as the calcium in Kanthapuram Aboobacker’s bones. As Shakespeare’s Shylock said, we are all “subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer…”

We are one cosmic family.

The universe did not create separate batches of matter for Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, or atheists.

We are all, without any exception, stuff that make up the stars.

Until the gods landed

And then an irony was born.

The universe spent billions of years bringing us together. Humans then spent a few hundred years finding ways to divide themselves.

Long after stars had been born and died, long after planets had formed, long after life had appeared on Earth, human beings began creating gods.

They gave these gods names, personalities, histories, and preferences.

They built temples, churches, mosques… They created scriptures to explain what the gods supposedly wanted. They developed rituals to please them and doctrines to distinguish one group of believers from another.

Something bizarre evolved. The beings who shared the same cosmic ancestry began quarrelling over whose God as the right God.

Marble and granite acquired divine shapes and became more sacred than humans. Books and symbols became holier than their creators!

And some human beings became so convinced that their particular piece of granite was superior and started hating, persecuting and even killing other people.

Humans refused to see truths. Truths like: the stars existed before temples. Planets existed before scriptures. Life existed before theology.

And the atoms in our bodies existed before anyone had imagined the words Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc.

It’s time we looked at one another differently. The stranger across the border is not merely a foreigner. The person of another religion is not an enemy. Underneath all our distinct identities lies the same ancient matter, the same stellar ancestry.

Our Earth itself is just a tiny speck in a universe containing hundreds of billions of galaxies. Galaxies, not just planets like our Earth.

If you can imagine that vastness, you will realise how ridiculous your fights are in the name of gods and scriptures.

The universe does not recognise your borders. Stars won’t ask for passports. In fact, we belong there, on the stars. We are all “star stuff.”

PS. This post was inspired by the editorial of Mathrubhumi, a Malayalam weekly, which I read this morning.  

PPS. If you wish to read in more detail about the origins and evolution of religion, you’re welcome to my book: The Simplest Guide to Religion. Ebook / Paperback. The ebook is free on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Amazon Prime subscribers can borrow the book absolutely free of charge.