Somebody mentioned the "we are all made of stardust" thing today and it reminded me how much that idea frustrates me. Not because it's wrong, per se, but because it's too simple. It misses out on some of the most important parts of the reality of how our constituent elements got here.
Calling us "stardust" massively understates our connections to the deepest parts of space and time. We're the children of some of the most violent events to ever happen in the universe.
The carbon that makes up every kind of life we know only exists when the heat at a star's core reaches temperatures six times hotter than the core of the Sun, and it is hurled out into the universe from the atmospheres of stars that are heaving their dying breaths.
The iron in our blood comes from a fusion reaction that only triggers when a supermassive star collapses inward, rebounding off of its own core and sending a shockwave slamming into the collapsing outer shell of its atmosphere that sears silicon atoms into radioactive nickel isotopes, burning as much as half the star's remaining mass in the space of a single day. Any elements more massive than iron are born within a single second of that process, in the heart of a supernova explosion, or in the cataclysmic impact of two neutron stars colliding, something that creates echoes in the fabric of space itself that can be heard on the other side of reality.
We are not just stardust. We are phoenixes, born from the ashes of cosmic annihilation. Spacetime carries our birth cries. Our progenitors were blue giants, supernovae, black holes. Stellar systems evaporated to herald our coming. We are what remains on the other side of entropy.
We are celestial fire. Never stop burning.
