We are Stardust
Just as we need to know darkness to understand and appreciate the light, sometimes the living species on this planet, and even the planet itself, have to go through a strong impact in order to be reborn. For me, a giant meteor that crashes on us, which can represent any or all of the calamities that the planet now faces, is the perfect metaphor to understand that, of suffering and calamity, of a blow of enormous dimensions, it is possible to obtain what is necessary to resurface strongly towards something spiritually superior.
When galaxies, planets, centuries, and their infinite histories were kept in a small place, excessively dense and hot, then at a certain time, approximately 14 billion years ago (about 169 million times the life expectancy of one of us), we begin to expand without help and to write the lines of our existence. Somehow, we were all there at the time. United as always and intermingled without knowing what the future holds.
A work published in PNAS in 2014 revealed that interplanetary dust from comets and asteroids continually falls on Earth and that, when bombarded by the solar wind, releases oxygen that is available to react with hydrogen to form water molecules and organic compounds, in a kind of “star seeding”. Perhaps, as the great physicist Richard Feynman said, “the most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that stars are made up of atoms of the same type as those on Earth.
” This fact, today known as the Cosmological Principle, is one of the bases of our current understanding of the universe and allows us to extend the laws of physics to all times and to all parts. Somehow, anyone can look at himself or his neighbor, aware that inevitably each part of us has lived countless stories to take our form, has traveled astral distances, has suffered from hellish temperatures, and has belonged to other worlds and other people.
Nobody better than the teacher Carl Sagan, astronomer and popularizer, to remind us that inevitably “We are made of stellar substance. No one better than us to exemplify the meaning and evolution of the material universe. And nothing better than science to open our eyes to the fascinating journey that awaits us. For everything we once were, a neutron a drift after the sinking of a star. For all that one day we will be.”