Once we can get our heads around the literal impossibleness of the number of possible combinations atoms can do, it starts to become possible that we can be made of stardust, right? Well, not star dust. Because we know that stars can die (our sun is, by the way, a star), a star can explode violently when its time is up and the number of atoms that can be ejected is literally uncountable. How many atoms would that need? About #1×10^50# atoms. Can you imagine how many possible permutations and arrangements that can bring? Now imagine the earth. However, based on the fact that almost #7×10^27# atoms consist one human being of around 70kg. The same (well, not really) atoms that created the Earth, in a different arrangement can form humans! But on a more serious note, in those 9 billion years, gravity, collisions between space rock and a whole lot of other factors gradually formed the Earth that we stand on now. The Universe is estimated to be around 13.7 billion years.Ī lot can happen in 9 billion years, my friend. In fact, the Earth is only estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old. With the carbon in your bones, the oxygen in your lungs, and the iron in your blood having been formed in the heart of a star that died.However, I got my head around that fact when I learnt one fact - that is, we are not the first thing to exist in the universe. Add a few billion years more to that and there will be you. Over the next few billion years, gravitational perturbations within this nebula will cause it to begin coalescing into a new star system. For decades, science popularizers have said humans are made of stardust, and now, a new survey of 150,000 stars shows just how true the old clich is: Humans and their galaxy have about 97. The extreme pressure that the star is under during this short time causes some of the already dense iron to fuse into the varying stages from Copper to Uranium, then it is flung outward forming a nebula along with all the other leftover elements from the star in an explosion so bright that it can sometimes outshine its entire parent galaxy. It's during this brief period in a star's life where the rest of the periodic table from Iron to Uranium forms. Either the force of gravity is too much and it keeps collapsing to form a black hole, or the sudden rise in internal pressure literally blows the star apart. Once enough iron builds up in the core of a massive enough star, the extreme gravitational pressure will be too much for even outward force of a constant nuclear explosion (which is all a star really is) to keep up with and the star will undergo what's called "Gravitational Collapse." At this point all of the matter in the star will be drawn inward until one of two things happens. The rest of the elements up through Uranium have to wait for the star to go supernova, if that's its fate, to be formed. If you have a Periodic table handy, which I think everyone should at all times, you'll notice this only covers about a fifth of the table. This process eventually leads to a buildup of Iron in a star's core, as Iron is as heavy an element that can be made through normal fusion. In the 2nd chapter of the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna, a deity says, "Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings nor in the future shall any of us cease to be."Ī star is powered by collecting a staggering amount of hydrogen into one place and fusing those atoms into new ones and those heavier elements "sink" into the core of the star where eventually they're fused into other elements. Once you realize that your atoms will be, and have been, everywhere, the Buddhist concept that we are the Universe, and consequently everywhere and everything, begins to sound like it makes more sense. On the expected timeline of Earth, it is more likely than not (according to my calculations) that the atoms that make up my body will end up as another human body, a tree, a dog, and a piece of dookie. It was the first time a concept like reincarnation in an eastern context began to sound plausible to me. This is the reason we can confidently say we are made of star dust. I remember having my mind blown as a child when I first learned about the conservation of mass and the conservation of energy, which states that matter/energy(and momentum) is not created nor destroyed.