AES030 - We're All Made of Stardust

When I was little, my mother would tell me stories of how we were all made of stardust. I would look up at the stars through the little slit of sky behind the window. Imagining the light dissipating into little golden flecks, swirling and shimmering, turning into a real living soul. It all seemed so wonderful. That something so huge, so great, so far away, was made of the same elements as I was. When I was older, I found out this story actually had some truth about it, as Carl Sagan said. I was reminded of this quote from Kak Andy's essay.

I’ve always loved the sky so much. I’ve written an unreasonable amount of metaphors about it. I asked my teacher once, when we die, if it was actually possible to turn humans into a star – like a sort of high-tech cremation – and he said that maybe someday we’d develop the means to heat human bodies up into plasma and send them to space. That night I spent hours lying in my bed and marveling at the wonderful prospect of it.

The stars we see aren’t actually in real-time, they’re so far away that there’s always a delay of several light-years. So we’re actually looking at something in the past. Which means, if I were to actually become a star, people would still see me a few lightyears after my star exploded. It’s a very comforting thought for me. We can be, even for a little bit more, eternal, at least for the humans on earth. 

Even a dead star leaves behind the remnants of a white dwarf. Sometimes I think that I wouldn’t really mind dying. I won’t be completely gone, anyway. I’d still be there, just in a different form. I wouldn’t even have to be cremated and turned into plasma and turned into a star.

When I feel small and heavy, the stars are what I think of. It’s nice to know that I really am just a tiny speck in the entirety of the universe, that I’ll never know everything, or be everything. But still, I am everything, because we’re all made of stardust, and so is the world.