Recommended reading: "
Goodbye Copernicus, Hello Universe," by Caleb Scharf, in Nautilus. Excerpt:
There
is something very old, deep, and, yes, significant that might challenge the
notion of our mediocrity.
It
starts because you’re made of the cumulative stuff of the cosmos. A little more
than 3.8 billion years ago some part of you came crashing to Earth. It might
have been a handful of your carbon, oxygen, or nitrogen atoms, or some of the
many hydrogen nuclei that now exist in your molecules. Primordial things are
these, the remains of a hot Big Bang that took place 10 billion years earlier.
Pieces of the one-in-a-billion tailings of a universe filled with annihilating
matter and antimatter.
Your
heavier elements passed through the digestive system of other stars. Cooked up
by nuclear fusion in 10 million degree stellar cores. Hidden from sight under
seething cloaks of plasma that could be millions of miles deep, these tiny
clusters of matter were eventually dispersed to interstellar space in
supernovae explosions that could momentarily outshine an entire galaxy. Cooling
in the chill of space, they inhabited nebular clouds, eventually once again
succumbing to gravity’s relentless embrace to fall inwards to the tumult of a
youthful swirl of matter surrounding a growing baby star. Going through this
process just once is enough to make a smattering of heavier elements if the
star is sufficiently massive, but it takes multiple stellar generations to
enrich the universe enough to build worlds like ours, and us. We are well down
the family tree.
Too much to summarize but a lot of fascinating stuff about astrobiology, Bayesian reasoning, the anthropic principle(s) and more. Whole thing here.
