Think about the tallest tower in the world. Imagine a billion of them, each bigger than the tallest structure ever constructed. Only then would you be able to visualize roughly 30 trillion cells, which is roughly how many rooms there are in your body? Now picture every person in the street. Your body contains 100 times as many cells as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and they all originate from the same location.
All the matter in the universe was instantly produced in an explosion 13.8 billion years ago, which resulted in a primordial soup of quarks, gluons, electrons, heat, and plasmas that was random but significant and rapidly growing. Now look at us. These fundamental building blocks of life, including yours, were created in the Big Bang. How did that chance come to be? How did it result in the intricate mechanisms in our bodies?
What’s Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night’s Dinner, by journalist and documentary filmmaker Dan Levitt, is published by HarperCollins. The book takes the reader on a vast journey and takes a deep dive into an endlessly fascinating subject. grabbed by proto.life
Daniel Levitt My daughter, who contemplated becoming a vegetarian as a teenager, is actually where it all began. I then realized that I didn’t know what my body or her body was composed of, let alone where any of that material originated from, and I began to wonder what our bodies were made of. After some thought and extensive Googling, I came to the conclusion that atoms are eternal and that every single particle in our body originated from the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. When you consider the path taken by those particles from the Big Bang, the development of the elements, the formation of the solar system, the formation of our planet, and the origin
And considering how we came to know these things made it much more amazing in my opinion. On the surface, it would appear impossible for us to be able to look back so far in time and learn so much about the past of what is inside our bodies. We are here 13.8 billion years later, tiny collections of those gluons, muons, and electrons that can gaze back in time and retrace history. With the Big Bang, you had gluons, quarks, and electrons, and they produced atoms. When you think about it, that’s simply pretty great in my opinion.
The fact that practically everything in our bodies was once formed by plants was one of the fascinating things I discovered. While the minerals were mined, plants made the majority of the vitamins. I could go on and on about photosynthesis, but one of the things I adore is that roughly 93% of our bodies’ dry mass is a result of photosynthesis. That is, only carbon dioxide that was simply floating through the air makes up 83 percent of the mass of our bodies. The remaining 10% is hydrogen derived from water. That makes up about 93% of us, right? We owe a debt of gratitude to plants and other photosynthesizers since without them, we would not exist.
