We Are All Made of Stardust

It may seem like an absurd statement, but it nonetheless is literally true. The legendary astronomer and author, Carl Sagan who even wrote the book that the movie ‘Contact’ was based on first coined the phrase. You may be thinking how could such a statement be true, it makes no sense since we know our bodies contain mostly water, bones, skin, vitamins and even minerals. Well, it all began with the formation of the universe otherwise known as the Big Bang.

At the beginning all the universe or what would become the universe was an incredibly dense mass the size of a period on a page. How could this be when everything in creation is so immense? It all boils down to density, though small in size this dot was unimaginably dense and would most likely crush a person into oblivion. Now back to the point. Once the Big Bang occurred, which by the way is believed to have only lasted between 3 to 17 minutes, certain elements and plasma exploded forth.

The elements that were most in abundance at the beginning were helium-4, helium-3, deuterium, and lithium-7 mixed with an amount of regular old hydrogen. So from all this materials combined with all that plasma began to form all the other materials we know of and more, eventually condensing into space dust, rocks, and gases. At this early stage of universal evolution is impossible to say exactly what forces caused all this material to cluster and swirl across space.

Keep in mind this all took hundreds of millions, even billions of years to form what we now know as the universe. When matter finally began to dominate everything, mainly cold dark matter, which is the black void of space though it has never been directly seen (if at all possible), the power of gravity took hold of all this material.

Here’s the fun part, gravitational forces cause all that matter and gas to swirl and condense, much like stirring stew into a thick mass. Stars and galaxies now take shape and eventually forms all the structures we have found including planets, moons, proto-planets, asteroids, comets, quasars, nebulae, galaxy clusters and even super clusters.

Seeing how all those simple materials led to such extraordinary phenomenon it is easy to say that all things consist of stardust! If not directly then at least indirectly since what formed us was formed by stardust stretching all the way back to the Big Bang itself. So it is a safe bet that when we pass on from this life and return to the Earth, we are in a sense returning to universe in the form of stardust meaning nothing or no one is ever really gone.

Once again, readers keep your eyes to sky and remember we are all made of stardust and everything is equal in its most basic form!