March 2012
33 posts
We are stardust →
edge.org
Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?
I’m going to get off my ass and go do something.
“A sermon wants to change your life, and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition.”
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I’m going to be spending the next couple of days without a phone. Outside of only listening to NPR (I used my phone for Spotify) in the car, I think it will be nice. I already feel disconnected, which feels odd, but I suppose I’ll live. We’ve functioned as tribes for a few hundred thousand years, without them. What’s a few days, eh?
There are three more video games that I want to finish and then I think I’m going to close this chapter in the history of me. My intertest in the culture of video games is waning, the time that I have to spend glued to the television is usually spent reading and it’s a costly hobby.
