The origin of life is the formation of the chemical elements themselves, the very things from which we’re made. Each and every form of life and structure on our planet in the known universe were conceived in the hearts of giant stars: everything that we see, breathe, touch, taste and are physically made of. All life on Earth is quite literally built from the chemical ashes of dead stars. We are stardust, the leftovers, debris and nothing more.

It is a scientific fact that was uncovered decades ago. It concerns the fabric of our entire cosmos, changing over time. When our universe was born in the Big Bang, it consisted of about ¾ hydrogen, a quarter helium and a smattering if lithium and deutherium. It still does. Think about anything chemical at all in the universe. Then think about what you’ve just learned. A universe filled with swiftly cooling hydrogen and helium gas, unknown dark materials and nothing else at all.

We have been created after the Big Bang. Stars all form from interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas that collapse under their own gravity, creating pressure and heat within. When the core of the cloud gets hot enough, it shines with nuclear fusion, just as our sun does now. What’s happening inside is that our hydrogen fuel is being converted into heat and light as atoms of hydrogen fuse together under the immense gravitational pressure: fusion.

The thing is, when this occurs, only a small percentage of the mass of each atom is released. The rest remains within, and so the 2 nuclei fuse and create helium, already present in the universe.

From this process a helium core grows inside the star, and, when it’s big enough, it too begins burning with nuclear fusion, creating carbon. If the star is large enough it creates even iron.

When these stars exhaust all their fuel, they blast their material out into space in supernova explosions to become part of the interstellar medium from which new stars are made.

The process is called “nucleosynthesis”. This is where you get the sodium in common salt, the neon in fluorescent lights and the magnesium in fireworks, not to mentions the zinc in our hair, the calcium in our bones and the carbon in our brain.

The iron in the hemoglobin in our blood shares the same origin as the iron in the rocks in our planet. In our body there’s enough iron to make a 3-inch nail, enough carbon for 900 pencils, enough phosphorous for 2,000 match heads and enough water for 10-gallon tank. We’re all chemical beings.

The physics behind all of this was worked out in the ‘50s and early ‘60s using Einstein’s general relativity. Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge and William Fowler did all the calculations long ago, and they’ve all been proven right with further actual obversation of the stars using spectroscopy. Fowler won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for the work done.