Cosmologist: Carl Sagan Was Wrong About Your Body

Carl Sagan said you are made of star stuff. He was half right.

Every heavy element in your body was forged inside a dying star. But the single most abundant element in you, hydrogen, was never made in a star at all. It was made in the first second of the universe, before any star existed.

This is the story of where your atoms actually came from, why the exact ratio of hydrogen to helium in the cosmos is the closest thing physics has to a photograph of the universe one second after the Big Bang, and why the same processes that built you make space the most hostile environment your biology has ever faced.

In this one:
- Why "star stuff" is only half the story
- The scientists who proved the Big Bang was necessary while trying to disprove it
- What happened when my team thought we found the signature of the Big Bang itself, and why we had to retract it
- Why radiation, vacuum, and zero gravity make the human body a poorly engineered spacecraft
- What panspermia actually predicts, and why the absence of life on Mars is weaker evidence than people think

00:00 The claim that breaks "star stuff"
00:54 Why hydrogen can't be made in a star
04:15 The man who named the Big Bang to mock it
05:12 Building an instrument at the end of the Earth
07:15 The discovery we had to take back
09:59 Space is beautiful. It's also trying to kill you
10:52 Your body is a badly designed spacecraft
12:48 Did life come from outer space
14:05 The math on surviving the trip
15:20 What 0.001% of the universe can do

If this changes how you think about where you came from, my two books go deeper:
Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://briankeating.com/?page_id=740

Get my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message and go deeper on this episode: https://briankeating.com/yt

If this changes how you think about where you came from, my two books go deeper: Losing the Nobel Prize and Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner.