She Felt Insignificant at First. But Cosmos Gave Her a Deeper Meaning of Life.

During a conversation at the dinner table in the year 2012, my then 10 year neice Vidisha asked an intersting question about the size of the universe. The answer really disturbed her and felt completely insignificant. Why?

Our sun is a medium-sized star and there are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on earth. And look the size of us on this earth. How can you even make sense? Do we even matter? she asked. But science gave us the meaning for our life in this universe. The astrophysics discovery during 1920 really changed our perspetive and revealed that we are more closely related to the universe than we can imagine.

Stars are nothing but hydrogen balls of gas. At their core under extreme pressures and temperatures, hydrogen fuses to helium and eventually into other elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium etc which are just ashes or stardust  which areat the of heart of a star. When big stars explode due to gravitationalimabalance , they throw off all of their contents into space and that stardust mixes up with interstellar gas clouds and form next generation of stars, planets and life. That is why we have calcium in our bones, carbon in our muscles, oxygen we breathe, H20 in our body. All of these elements are manufactured in the core of stars long ago. We are made up of the same elements that the universe made of.

Yes, we know that we are in this universe. But more importantly, universe exists with in us.You cannot be more significant than this!