The atoms that make up your bodies came from somewhere. They weren’t manufactured in your mother’s womb; they were obtained from the environment, which consisted of the food she ate while she carried the embryo that would become you. Actually, this process continues. We are constantly irrigated with matter; we take in nutrients which the nanontechnological machinery of the cells uses to sustain our bodies. The complex chemical symphony plays itself out second-by-second.

But where did those atoms actually originate? Were they always around, or did they come about through a process? Hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements in the cosmos, followed by oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Hydrogen and helium are the lightest elements, and they’ve been around since electrons and nuclei could come together (this happened when the universe had cooled down sufficiently). The heavier elements just mentioned, and many others, had to wait for stars to form. In the nuclear furnaces of stars, hydrogen and helium atoms are fused into heavier elements. Eventually, there comes a time when the star tries to fuse iron. Unable to do this, the star collapses, shedding off its outer layers in a tremendous burst of energy called a supernova, while its core is reduced to a super-dense neutron star, or, if the star is massive enough, into a black hole. The outer layers are cast off into space, enriching the cosmos with the ingredients for complex chemistry. These ingredients are mixed in with the ingredients for making planets. Eventually, life may arise, using the atoms that were forged in the crucibles of stars. As Richard Dawkins has said, it is no coincidence that we see stars when we look up at night, because in order for carbon-based beings to exist at all, the carbon must be manufactured in stellar furnaces. We therefore share a deep kinship with the cosmos. The stuff that swirls around in gas clouds millions of light years away, and that is being produced in nuclear engines 15 million degrees hot, is the stuff that makes up you and I.

Carl Sagan also said: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Neil deGrasse Tyson, another prominent astronomer and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan, has said: “We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.”

These are beautiful truths that everyone should appreciate and reflect upon. To be denied this view of the universe and our place in it, to never have the chance to contemplate the connection we share with not only our biological kin but our atomic kin, is an affrontery to knowledge and a terribly wasted opportunity to exhalt in the majesty of the cosmos.