Every physical item that I’ve ever bought in my life was on a truck at some point.
And not just that technology. I remember a quote from somewhere “For the majority of the world’s population, the Middle Ages ended around 1950.” Think what changes the average elderly Chinese, Indian or Indonesian has seen in their lives…
And the most mind-blowing thing is that no-one knows how to make a truck. Quite likely, no one person knows even how to make one of the tail-light assemblies. The person who designed the assembly line most likely didn’t bother about the details of the annealing oven - they just specified “annealing oven goes here” and left someone else to work out how it should be constructed and powered and controlled. They probably didn’t bother about the design or construction of the circuit boards, other than ordering standard part X from supplier Y. There are probably teams of people at various component factories who have no idea that their products even go into truck tail lights, much less how.
And yet, at the end of the day, trucks come off the line. When you think about it, it seems like magic.
Every single man-made item was DESIGNED by someone. Even something as mundane as a pencil or a paper clip. Your car’s door handles. The soles of your shoes. The buttons of your shirt. Everything had to be designed.
Although it’s true that it could not have been otherwise in our universe, I feel like you might be under a misapprehension. “We are all made of star-stuff” doesn’t mean that we are made of the same stuff as stars. It refers to the fact that the Big Bang produced only hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Of those, only hydrogen is a reasonable fraction of your body.
Everything else–the carbon, the oxygen, the calcium, and so on–was produced in the heart of a star. The elements were produced by the fusion cycle and an explosion of unimaginable intensity (though to get a sense of scale, I’ll paraphrase xkcd: a supernova watched from Earth’s distance to the sun would be like having a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball–times a billion).
The explosion scattered its ashes across its part of the galaxy. The ashes coalesced and eventually became you.
So you passed through the core of a star, perhaps more than once. I suppose it might be more accurate to say We are all star-shit, but that’s perhaps less poetic.
That’s a very interesting observation. If individual goals oppose communal goals, things are presumably more difficult…?
Designed and built.
And not only that, everything shitty in the human world — litter, injustice, bad food — exists because no-one ‘undesigned’ or ‘unbuilt’ it…
On this note, I have to wonder how people started eating many different foods. Take milk, for example. Who decided, “I’m gonna drink this white liquid that comes out of these big animals, if only I can get one to stay still long enough to get some…”
I’m absolutely not against the principle of taxation for the funding of collective necessities, but I’m occasionally drawn to wonder if the price of some things isn’t almost entirely tax.
Let’s say I buy a chicken and mushroom pie with chips and peas for dinner at my local pub. I pay Value Added Tax on my meal. Actually, I already paid income tax on the money I used to buy the meal, so I’m down on the deal before I even start. Part of the cost of the meal is the salary of the server and the cook - they pay income tax, so I’m indirectly paying that tax as well. The person who delivered the ingredients too, and the person who raised the chickens, grew the mushrooms, grew the wheat to make the pie crust - I’m paying for them so I’m contributing to their income tax too. Every company involved is paying corporate taxes. Energy used will have some sort of levy on it. Import duties on ingredients. I’m getting boring, so I’ll stop now - just finally pointing out that the cook and the server have the same constellation of tax burdens as me - and I’m picking up my share of that total…
j
An Impossible burger with real bacon tastes better than a regular burger with real bacon.
Years ago I acquired two three-legged kittens (it was either that or let them be sent to a shelter where they would most likely be put down). The first night we carried them upstairs to the bedroom so they wouldn’t feel abandoned. The next day they climbed up the stairs on their own; they were both missing a hind leg but managed to balance on their remaining leg to get their front paws onto the next step and haul themselves up.
The male would also jump up and try and catch flies. I seem to recall he got up about three feet sometimes.
If you dried out your fecal matter, half the weight of the dried out fecal matter would be bacteria.
My thought is that the statement sounds like a revelation, perhaps to recognize the contrast from the historical belief that there is something “special” about humans. To me, the baseline view should be that we’re made of the same stuff that’s all around us. Why shouldn’t we be?
I guess my point is that I understand why the statement can be both amazing and mundane at the same time.
There are many elements on Earth that the a star can produce, but far more than could have been produced inside a star. I think that the heaviest element that can be produced inside a star the size of the sun is lead. Larger stars can apparently produce heavier elements, but even then, I think it takes either a supernova or a collision of very massive stars to produce the heavier elements in the quantities that we see.
On the other hand, the helium in your party balloon was very unlikely to have been produced by the Big Bang or to have ever been inside a sun even though its precursor was. Helium is too light to have been captured by gravity in rebuilding the Earth. Rather, we lose hydrogen and helium into space every year. The fate of any helium that we use is to be lost into space relatively quickly. The helium that we have was produced by the nuclear processes in the core of the Earth and slowly bubbles up to be trapped by granite. Any helium that isn’t trapped by granite makes its way slowly to the surface, into the atmosphere, and from there into space. While helium is replenished, the rate is so slow that when we use up what we have, we will effectively have none.
Helium atoms are so tiny that when being transported in very heavy double tanks by truck, will still leak out in non-negligible amounts.
Disclaimer: I am far from expert on any of this and may be wrong about the details.
And they can see in the dark. Or at least what we humans perceive as dark. To a cat it’s probably just a kind of dim compared to normal daylight. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been feeling my way down the hallway and almost tripped over my cat, who is just walking around as if he can see just fine. And the cat’s probably thinking “Dude, I’m right here! What, are you blind?” Yes, kitty, without artificial light we humans pretty much are blind at night.
Ordinary fusion stops at iron, regardless of the size of the star. Humans don’t need much of these elements, but there are a few key ones, like iodine and selenium.
Regardless, we all went through a supernova, because that’s the only way for the elements to be distributed (forming a nebula, and then a planetary disk, and finally coalescing into a planet). Otherwise, they’d be stuck forever in a white dwarf or the like.
You are right that helium is continually lost and all of it on earth is produced via radioactive decay (alpha particles) and then trapped. Hydrogen, not so much, because there is basically no free hydrogen in the atmosphere–it’ll react into water, which is heavy enough to not be lost. I’m sure some tiny quantities are lost anyway.
That’s not my understanding of the phrase. The complete quote from Carl Sagan is more explicit:
Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.
That aside, the point you are making is, in my opinion, more revelatory than it seems. It is one of the most common patterns in the history of science to understand that what’s happening over there is the same as what’s happening here, or vice versa. Newton’s theory of gravity came from realizing that what pulled the planets on their trajectories was the same force as what pulled apples to the ground. Stars themselves were not immediately understood to be the same as our sun. And for a case of the opposite, helium was discovered as an element in the sun before it was found on Earth.
Oh, sure. That’s the whole point of this thread, after all.
Aaarrgggh. You’re right. Iron, not lead.
I’ve already been ninja’d by @Dr.Strangelove on most of what I wanted to say in response to your original comment, but let me add a bit more clarification about this.
Of course we’re “made of the same stuff that’s all around us”, but the salient question is, where did that stuff come from? The answer isn’t obvious. The Big Bang created quarks and leptons that eventually formed hydrogen, helium, and very small amounts of lithium. Maybe even a bit of beryllium. But that’s it. That isn’t a universe that’s conducive to life.
Many of the heavier elements were formed as a byproduct of stellar nuclear fusion in first-generation stars, but none heavier than iron. Most of the naturally occurring heavier elements were produced by the extreme conditions of supernovae, which also served to disperse them through the universe These drifting clouds eventually coalesced in next-generation stars, and the planets that formed around them were rich in the elements from which life could evolve. Thus, the statement that we are all made of star stuff is quite literally true in a very specific way.
An interesting twist on this is that there’s plausible evidence that at least some portion of heavy elements like gold and uranium were produced, not from supernovae, but from rapid neutron capture processes resulting from the collision of neutron stars.
Daily, each of us kills millions of organisms through activities of daily living, including routine personal hygiene.*
*some of us are greater killers than others.
It does look like there’s a longer history to the “star-stuff” line:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/22/starstuff/
And to be fair to Jackknifed_Juggernaut, it looks like the older uses are more in line with his interpretation. For instance, from 1918:
Thus we come to see that if our bodies are made of star-stuff ,—and there is nothing else, says the spectroscope, to make them of—the loftier qualities of our being are just as necessarily constituents of that universal substance out of which are made
“Whatever gods there be.”
We are made of universal and divine ingredients, and the study of the stars will not let us escape a wholesome and final knowledge of the fact.
It’s an odd argument to my mind, but regardless, what’s being said here is that we are made of the same elements, not that the elements were made in a star (that wasn’t known in 1918 anyway).
All that said, I feel like Sagan is responsible for the modern interpretation of the line, and that’s certainly what I had in mind when I said it.