“I simply saw the similarity & created the composite” writes iScorpious about Cosmic Mandrill, the featured image above. At first glance, it’s easy to see the similarity between the image of the nebula and that of the mandrill – both images pop with bright fuschia, tints and shades of green, and icy blue. But the composite is also a visual reminder of a deeper connection. Be it mandrill, mango or man, the chemical elements that make up living organisms were originally created in the interior furnaces of stars and subsequently spewed out by their explosion:
In “The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective” (pg. 134), Carl Sagan poetically used the term “star-stuff” to express this fact :
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. We are made of star-stuff.
In his 1980 science series Cosmos, Sagan became “an important locus for the dissemination of this expression”. In “Journeys in Space and Time” (episode 8), Sagan describes how “we are star stuff taking its destiny into its own hands”, setting out for the stars from which we had come. In “Who Speaks for Earth” (episode 13), Sagan again expounds on life from star-stuff.
Although Sagan popularized the term, star-stuff had been in circulation decades beforehand. In 1918, astronomer Albert Durrant Watson delivered a speech that included the phrase “our bodies are made of star-stuff”. In 1929, the New York Times printed an article titled “The Star Stuff That Is Man” in which astronomer Harlow Shapley stated:
We are made of the same stuff as the stars, so when we study astronomy we are in a way only investigating our remote ancestry and our place in the universe of star stuff. Our very bodies consist of the same chemical elements found in the most distant nebulae, and our activities are guided by the same universal rules.
Before LUCA (the last universal common ancestor), there was a cosmic common ancestor, a long-ago star. Like Cosmic Mandrill, we are all star stuff.
Read more about the usage of the star-stuff expression.
Sources:
Featured image, ‘Cosmic Mandrill’ by iscorpious/deviantart, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
“We Are Made of Star-Stuff”, Quote Investigator.