14 DAY TRIAL // This past weekend, I introduced you to a video documenting what happens to the human body after death. The time is now right to take you on a journey to the beginning of life on Earth. Fair warming: your mind might get blown.
Not to beat about the bush, the video below uses science to explain why, at one point, astronomer Carl Sagan said that we and the world around us were all made of star stuff. As surprising as this may sound, Carl Sagan was not talking metaphorically when he made this statement.
For several hundred years, it was believed that the atoms that comprise the world as we know it had existed since, well, forever, and that they were as old as the universe itself.
It took a while for scientists to figure out that the elements included in the periodic table actually come from stars that, billions of years ago, started fusing together elementary particles and ended up birthing the universe's first atoms.
Scientists say that, at first, stars fuse hydrogen into helium. When they eventually run out of hydrogen as a fuel, they start fusing helium into heavier elements such as oxygen and carbon.
Having reached the end of their lives, stars explode in a supernova and all the elements that they kept busy forming for billions of years get scattered all across the universe. In time, they become part and parcel of planets like the one we call home.
Interestingly enough, some researchers estimate that about 93% of our bodies comprise stardust. The other 7% represents hydrogen that formed not in stars, but in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
