I didn’t make this video but it illustrates a point I talk about below. It does it in a pretty trippy way by making these interviews into a song and autotune the responses.
Last year when I was sitting in my graduate-level Environmental Chemistry class my mind got blown away by a realization. I’ve always heard about ‘stardust’ and other things of that nature and I didn’t pay much thought to it, but put it in the realm of unicorns and lyrics from70’s or 80’s music. But that class brought a whole new meaning to it and this video touches on that realization I had that day. I say I had a realization in the sense that I learned something new.
We are composed of atoms from dead stars that exploded a long time ago. We could not exist if these stars did not shrink, burn up, and die! Think about it for a second. We are made of stars that died and exploded, and are only in existence because of those events. It’s hard not to share something like this. I know when I found out about it I immediately told several people, and thought ‘how did I not know this already?’
I couldn’t find my notes from this class (so feel free to correct me in the comment section below, even if you think the Earth is only 4,000 years old), but essentially this is what happened:
After the big bang there was only Hydrogen in the universe and all other elements, like what we’re made of, were created from Hydrogen. That happened from a star burning Hydrogen for a long time (understatement), and as it ran out of Hydrogen the star began to shrink, it also became hotter with it’s smaller mass. As it became hotter it excited elements to the point where it formed Helium which would only be able to be formed at this high heat and pressure (nuclear fusion), and the star would burn Helium, until it ran out again and the process would continue burning up an element, the star shrinking, thus increasing the heat and pressure to create new elements, until it would turn into a supernova and die, exploding these new elements all over the universe, to eventually form us, and everything we know. It’s called stellar nucleosynthesis.
That is at least a super simple version that I can remember without my class notes from 2 years ago. Here is a link to NASA explaining it a bit:
and other smart people:
This mind-blowing realization you had is the foundation of the argument for a surpeme creator being from evidence of intelligent design…and also the argument for the exclusivity of man as intelligent/advanced life in the universe.
It IS mid blowing, and only gets more mind-blowing when you grok that it took far too much precision to be a randomly ocurring event.
It doesn’t take much to get me going in that direction around a camp fire…let me know if you want to hear about it.
Hey John, thanks for your comment. I share your awe at this, but in a different way and I too can wax on about this topic for quite some time.
I am familiar with William Paley’s argument from design and have found it less than illuminating however. One example is vestigial organs in our bodies like our tailbone which is no longer useful, or even on a genetic level our pseudogene’s which also no longer serve a purpose. It doesn’t seem like a great or precise design and definitely one that could come about only through evolution. Even something as amazing as our eyes has had enough time to evolve many times over along several different lineages of species.
As to the exclusivity of man as being the intelligent/advanced life in the universe, I would also have to disagree, but I haven’t heard many arguments for it before either. With a little searching and comparing to other species it’s easy to find others that have more advanced eyesight, hearing, strength, speed, and do not destructively harm our planet on the scale we now do. In addition, if it was a one and a billion shot that there was another earth-like planet just in our own Milky Way galaxy, then there could be 100 earth’s. Now, take that to the scale of the universe which has billions and billions of galaxies, there could be somewhere around 500 billion earth-like planets. I find it hard to believe we are very exclusive on a universal scale or have everything else beat on intelligence.
I do appreciate your comment and friendly conversations about these topics, I think they are very interesting but have realized it’s better to agree to disagree sometimes, but am open to talking about the subject.
A star died before you could live.
Ummmm…. David…..Did ur star die before it could elaborate!!??
John Curry i absolutely agree, i am a TA at Harvard University, 3rd year. I would love to elaborate on this also
Hi Tegon, for what department are you a TA? Feel free to elaborate here if you’d like.
Cheers,
Lucas