ELON: YOUR ATOMS HAVE BEEN INSIDE STARS Elon paused for a moment, thinking out loud about where everything began. He traced the story of existence from a cloud of hydrogen to the birth and death of stars, all leading, somehow, to us. His thought drifted from physics into philosophy: “I’ve thought about how we got here if we just started as a hydrogen gas cloud that condensed and formed stars, and then these stars exploded and then re condensed and formed stars again, and then exploded again, and eventually you get to us, 13.8 billion years later. One of the interesting questions to think about is how many times have your atoms been at the center of a star?” Every carbon, oxygen, and iron atom in your body was once inside a star. Hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element, came from the Big Bang itself. The rest was forged in furnaces of collapsing giants that lived, died, and scattered their cores into the cosmos. You are, quite literally, the universe recycling itself into consciousness. Source: @LaceyPresley @elonmusk