It is Friday night and I feel the need to tell you a thing about being stardust

Yes, you are made of stars. Yes, you, in particular.

Mostly.

All that carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc — that was all made in stars. Most of your body is made of that stuff: atoms that a star forged inside itself or at the moment of its unimaginably violent death.

So, yes, you are stardust. But only if you count by mass. If you count the number of atoms in you, most of those?

Hydrogen.

Never part of a star at all.

Most of your atoms have been in the Universe for 13.8 billion years.

Most of your atoms were forged in the Big Bang itself.

I think it’s cool that we are made of stars, that our planet and our bodies and everything we touch can only exist because of the nuclear alchemy in the hearts of stellar infernos.

But I think it’s MUCH cooler that most of our atoms have been in the cosmos all along.

You are stardust. And you are the ashes of the Big Bang. And you are, at every imaginable level, a creation of the Universe, vast and beautiful and suffused with unbridled power.