Hey Big Thinkers,
If you zoom out on the question, “Where do you come from?”, you might point to your ancestors who lived centuries ago. Zooming out further, you could look back on the evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa some 300,000 years ago, or the first vertebrates to crawl out of the ocean 370 million years ago, or life first forming on Earth several billion years before that.
But if you really take the long view, you’ll see that humanity’s story was already taking shape before our planet existed. “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,” the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in 1973. “We are made of star-stuff.”
Sagan was far from the first person to note our cosmic lineage, however. This week, we dive into centuries of history to trace how scientists discovered that we are, in a very real sense, the children of ancient stars.
Onward,
Stephen |
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