We Are All Made of Stars | Brian Cox and Joe Rogan

One of the biggest mind-blowing moments, I think, of my limited comprehension of what it means to be a living being was when I found out that carbon and all the stuff that makes us has to come out of a dying star. Yeah. Like that alone, that there's this very strange cycle of these enormous fireballs that forge the material that makes Brian Cox. Yeah. Like what? That one alone, that there's some strange loop of biological life that comes from stars, which is like the most elemental thing that we can observe. We see these things in the sky. We see the sun in the sky. It's this all-powerful ball of fire. And that that is where the building blocks for a person come from. I know. And they will be from the carbon atoms in our body that you're right, they all got made in stars because there were none of it at the Big Bang. There's only hydrogen and helium, tiny bit of lithium to be precise, but nothing else. And so it was all made in stars. And it's probably from different stars. The atoms in your body, they're not all from one star that cooked it and then died. There'll be a mixture of stuff from many stars in your body now. And I agree with you. What more do you want? When I see people who go, I want more than that. There must be more to it. What do you mean? The ingredients in our bodies were assembled in the hearts of long dead stars over billions of years and have assembled themselves spontaneously into temporary structures that can think and feel and explore. And then those structures will decay away again at some point. And in a very far future, there'll be no structures left. So there we are. We exist in this little window when we can observe this magnificent universe. Why do you want any more? Well, I think a lot of people aren't aware of all the information. And then I think on top of it, for some people, it's so overwhelming. Yeah, this concept of 13.8 billion years of everything to get to this point that we're at right now, it's so overwhelming that they want to simplify it. They want to put it into some sort of a fable structure, something that's very common and similar and familiar. Yeah, I agree. But I think that's the journey that we go on. The real treasure, I think, is in that journey of trying to face the incomprehensible. It's in that realization that it's almost impossible to believe that we exist. That's a wonderful thing. And I think that's what I think you miss out. I think if you decide to simplify it because you don't want to face that, you don't want to face the infinity that's out there in front of us. And you don't want to face those stories, as you said, that you look at your finger and its ingredients was cooked in multiple styles over billions of years. That's, to me, a joyous and powerful thing to think about. And I think you're missing out if you don't want to face that.