Our bodies, my body, the body. We always think about the cells that compose it and which are continually renewed (when they start to replicate badly it’s a problem, or you’re simply getting old), rarely about atoms, which seem like a more abstract thing. Yet everything is made of atoms, you who are reading, your smartphone, the chair you are sitting on, the sky, the planets, the stars, everything you see around you: atoms.
By the way, I read about a new study by astronomers at the University of Washington, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters: thanks to the Hubble space telescope we have discovered a kind of cosmic conveyor belt that would have pushed carbon and oxygen atoms into the Milky Way even before its formation of the Solar System. “The carbon itself in our bodies has most likely spent amounts of time outside the galaxy,” says Jessica Werk, one of the study’s co-authors.
Intergalactic atomic transfer is interesting, but not that special of a thought, if we think that hydrogen atoms were formed thirteen billion years ago, when there were no billions of galaxies that make up the visible universe. If we drink a glass of water, for each molecule of that water there are two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Which end up in our body, made up of around 60% water, very ancient matter that has been everywhere, in other things, in other bodies.
In any case we can have intergallatic carbon in our body, the hydrogen of the early universe, but I would like to focus in general on atoms and life on our planet. The atoms we are made of are the same ones that dinosaurs were made of, which existed sixty million years ago: you probably have T-Rex atoms on your nose.
But you probably have a little bit of everything. A few atoms of Napoleon, another of Proust, another of Hitler, Neanderthal atoms (and of that also 4% of DNA). Even living people, given the number of cells we lose every day and which enter into recycling and become other things. I don’t know, do you like Tom Cruise? You might have atoms that have been in Tom Cruise’s body. The same goes for all the objects around you, made of atoms that are billions of years old. Obviously where these atoms are we will never know, because one carbon atom (fundamental element for life) is as good as another, and inside there is no passport-type quantum register to know where it has been.
There is also a mysticism about atoms, probably derived from a spiritualist, new age interpretation of Einstein’s relativity, according to which matter and energy are the same thing, and a small amount of matter can produce large amounts of energy (other than spirituality, the Japanese experienced Einstein’s discovery first-hand in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). So there are those who exorcise death by saying: “my molecules will become part of the universe”, the problem is that they will only be molecules, composed of atoms, and they will not be called Maria, Gino, Steve, Adolf.
However, it is a suggestion that I also fall for every now and then (while alive, not thinking about death). For example, my idol is Freddie Mercury, and I went to his places in search of his ideal molecules (look for the reportage I wrote here in the newspaper). Then I thought about it: but I could have Freddie’s atoms on me! Not everyone, some. Certainly thirteen billion years ago we were all in the same point, everything that exists and has existed was in the same point.
We were all there, but there was no one there. Now we are stardust, but even stars die. To form other stars, until in the entire universe, after its thermal death, there will no longer be even an atom. Nothing and no one, like at the beginning.