cymbidia
unrepentant pervert
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2001
- Posts
- 8,786
Look at your hand.
Yes. Now, please.
Lift it off the keyboard and just look at it for a moment.
Every single atom that makes up every single molecule of every cell in your hand was once a part of a star.
In the long ageless span of time before thinking humans appeared on our small planet in our insignificant corner of a very average galaxy, stars through out the universe lived and died in grand rhythms. In the wild contortions of their death throes, they seeded the universe with the atoms of the elements of all that would come to exist after they were no more.
Everything you are, everything you wear, eat, breathe, see, feel, kiss, swallow, and long for, everything that ever was or ever will be was once part of a star.
To be alive and sitting at your computer reading this is to be, as Carl Sagan said, composed of star stuff.
When we die, our bodies break down. The organ systems become compounds, and the compounds become atoms. Again, we're reduced to the basics, elemental matter, as we were before we were formed.
Such is "life".
It's the in between that's so important to us, racing toward death in a madcap manner, burning the fuel of our lives recklessly in the same way the most wildly spendthrift of the stars, the red supergiants, race toward death almost joyously, burning themselves up in the process.
We live.
We love.
We learn.
All else is window-dressing.
Most of the rest of it petty.
We only have a handful of years, too, which look like a lot when one is beginning to count them but race away all too fast as we in the middle know.
We're red supergiants, and we have only fragile, short lives allotted to us. Soon, too soon, we'll all be elemental atoms again, our parts seeding another person or a plant or drifting out, away from this planet in some way to become, again, the heart of a new star.
Live.
Love.
Learn.
There is nothing else.
(The study of astronomy is pretty cool.
That'd fall into the "learn" category, wouldn't it?)
Yes. Now, please.
Lift it off the keyboard and just look at it for a moment.
Every single atom that makes up every single molecule of every cell in your hand was once a part of a star.
In the long ageless span of time before thinking humans appeared on our small planet in our insignificant corner of a very average galaxy, stars through out the universe lived and died in grand rhythms. In the wild contortions of their death throes, they seeded the universe with the atoms of the elements of all that would come to exist after they were no more.
Everything you are, everything you wear, eat, breathe, see, feel, kiss, swallow, and long for, everything that ever was or ever will be was once part of a star.
To be alive and sitting at your computer reading this is to be, as Carl Sagan said, composed of star stuff.
When we die, our bodies break down. The organ systems become compounds, and the compounds become atoms. Again, we're reduced to the basics, elemental matter, as we were before we were formed.
Such is "life".
It's the in between that's so important to us, racing toward death in a madcap manner, burning the fuel of our lives recklessly in the same way the most wildly spendthrift of the stars, the red supergiants, race toward death almost joyously, burning themselves up in the process.
We live.
We love.
We learn.
All else is window-dressing.
Most of the rest of it petty.
We only have a handful of years, too, which look like a lot when one is beginning to count them but race away all too fast as we in the middle know.
We're red supergiants, and we have only fragile, short lives allotted to us. Soon, too soon, we'll all be elemental atoms again, our parts seeding another person or a plant or drifting out, away from this planet in some way to become, again, the heart of a new star.
Live.
Love.
Learn.
There is nothing else.
(The study of astronomy is pretty cool.
That'd fall into the "learn" category, wouldn't it?)
