Stardust
It's easy to think of ourselves as separated from everything, but this is not true. We are as much the universe as a neutron star or a black hole or a nebula. Even better, actually, we are its thinking and feeling part: the centre organs of the universe.
Kurzgesagt • Optimistic Nihilism
oceans, and mountains swirl and rise and sink. This rabbinic midrash reflects the same reality that science does: we are all, literally, composed of the entire earth, indeed, of stardust from supernovae millions of light-years away. The components of our bones, the cells of our blood, the air that we breathe—all that was used by others before us, a
... See moreRabbi Bradley Shavit DHL Artson • God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice... See more
The Universe has a history only because we are here to tell it.
Marcelo Gleiser • The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future
When stars explode at death, all the matter that built up in their outer shells gets blown out into interstellar space. Carbon, oxygen, silicon, gold, and silver were all floating around as clouds of elements in space, then gravity pulled them together to form the planets. This is how the planet Earth formed with its ninety-two natural elements, al
... See moreMichael A. Singer • Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament
thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see
... See moreBecky Chambers • A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot Book 1)
As human beings we all breathe the atoms that made up our ancestors and flow into the same earth when we die.
Stephen Hanselman • The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
There are no new ingredients in the universe, and humans – however they may look – are made of roughly the same things we are.