For many years the theory about panspermia passed like a flash of pseudoscience before the eyes of researchers. For decades, a kind of disdain was added to anyone who believed that life could have come from the immensity of the cosmos, since life, according to what we knew, had emerged on our planet. But any mind that dares to go beyond what is established and that manages to find a balance between objectivity and the very philosophy of curiosity is destined to do great things. Carl had the power to unite the depths of science with poetic philosophy about the existence of life and in that sense, he found a shocking way to make us understand that in some way, we are all made of stardust.
The impact of Cosmos
In the early 1980s, astronomer and researcher Carl Sagan took on a titanic task. That of bringing the emotion and love for science to the homes of millions of viewers, and he did it in his own peculiar way through his television program Cosmos. Without using incomprehensible language and conveying how amazing our Universe can be, Sagan impacted the minds of his viewers.
Although throughout its 13 episodes, Sagan explored the wonders of various topics of science including the origin of life and its evolution, there was one moment that was marked forever. The moment Sagan used the phrase “We are made of star matter”, the understanding of our origin in the most scientific and poetic sense was embedded in the collective imagination and allowed us to assimilate that we are more than simple meaningless life.
“The cosmos is also within us, we are made of star matter. “We are a way for the Universe to know itself.”
The Universe lives within us
Perhaps for those who were more skeptical, Sagan’s statement echoed as doubt in their minds, however, the famous astronomer knew what he was referring to and he was right. It is not that life per se had arrived from the outside, but in a certain way each and every one of the beings that live on Earth are made up of stellar material, since the atoms of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and all the elements that make us up, came from the cosmos.
The Universe was originally hydrogen and helium, carbon was later created during a process that lasted millions of years. But how did the material from the stars reach us? This required supernovae.
When supermassive stars have completely exhausted their source of hydrogen, they can undergo a violent explosion called a supernova. The explosion of this type of star is so dramatic that it can eclipse an entire galaxy with its brightness before fading little by little. It is at this moment where the component material of the supernova, which makes up heavy elements, spreads throughout the galaxy. The elements that gave us life and of which we are made, came from these explosions that little by little came together in forms that we now know as .
It is for this reason that Carl Sagan said his famous phrase about how we all have cosmic material in our bodies. And if we think about it in that poetic sense, we are part of a whole that in turn lives within us, we are cosmos.