My age is 14 billion years. I was born with the big bang and I will die with the big crunch. In between I am here on this earth for a short time, and then I will again proceed on my interstellar journey. For this I will not need a VOYAGOR, in my original form I don’t need any vehicle to move around, for I hold the universe inside me and the universe holds me.
After the big bang there was only gas clouds made up of predominantly hydrogen an also some helium. Then gravity started pulling these elements together, thus increasing the density and making it hotter. They started forming balls and denser clumps. Some of these went on to become stars. The main role of the stars is making lighter elements into heavier ones. A hotter star will be able to create heavier elements. Stars like the sun can only create helium mainly. Stars 8 times the size of sun can create iron that is element 26. The furnace of a star may fail to create platinum (element 78) and gold (element 79), to do so and bigger events like collision of stars are required.
The star will perform its duty as long as it has the fuel then it will die. The smaller stars which have iron or lighter elements in core will transform to red giants and float in the space. The bigger stars will keep on collapsing forming elements heavier than iron and releasing energy and then it will go boom, a supernova explosion that will spew away all the elements inside it to space. These will again become building blocks of future stars. And the process will keep on going.
Elements are the building blocks of the visible universe and life. Earth has 92 elements in its natural state. Hydrogen the element 1 has one proton and Uranium, element 92 has 92 protons. Within us we have a big chunk of carbon element 6, the bones have calcium element 20 and our blood has iron element 26. All these are not the patented elements of earth but have been formed in those stars which have become extinct now after fulfilling its purpose. Every element is coming from stars that explode and give out star dust and when we combine them in different proportions we get various types of gases and minerals and asteroids and eventually earth. Then eventually we get water and other ingredients for making life and thus us.
The Milky Way which is about 5 billion years old created the 92 elements and our solar system which is about 4.5 billion years old is a combination of it. It took a few billion more years for earth to combine them to create the first forms of life. One thing is very clear that all the elements inside us were created within the furnace of some stars or a collision of two stars. These elements combined into the molecules which became the source of life. It was not god using various test tubes to find the right combination.
Everything that is inside us is coming from star dust and the hydrogen which makes about 9.5 percent of our body may be even from the big bang, the beginning of time.
When scientists and astronomers peek through those big telescopes, they become a time traveler seeing the distant galaxies and their stars, a red giant or a supernova explosion happening at some part of the universe. From these sometime in future newer galaxies, solar systems and planets will be created and in one of those planets in a few billion years from now new life forms will be created. But by that time life on this planet will finish. Thus the cycle of life, from stardust to another will continue in this universe. May be some part of me today will be in another life form in a distant corner of the universe at a distant point of time. But I will be somewhere out there for sure, in life form or my primordial form.
Is this what we call self realization, the real truth knowing which all other things become immaterial? But how many will understand it and more importantly accept it as the ultimate truth. One a handful of us can gauge things in such a large scale which is beyond the processing capacity of human mind. Does the ‘I’ have any place in such a grandeur.
Ponder on it.
