Introduction to Self Aware Stardust

Welcome to Self Aware Stardust! In this article, I will be introducing myself and providing a taste of things to come. It’s part autobiography, science, art, and philosophy. To do this properly, I really ought to answer the traditional 5 W’s – Who, What, Where, When & Why.

So, lets begin.

Who am I?

My name is Sean Hummer. I am a certain type of hairless bipedal ape. All of those are of course made up words, but the made up science of Biology has made up a very specific phrase for this: Homo Sapiens. Homo means ‘man.’ Sapiens means ‘wise.’ This makes me a little uncomfortable, because although I can buy that I am a human, the wise part – I’m not so sure. But I’m trying to live up to the name and not make the Biologists into liars. Crossing my fingers here.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Well, my beginning anyway. I started off here:

Not long after that, I was busy doing this:

This went on for a while. It was hard work and I was multiplying cells like crazy. Luckily I had an instruction manual – DNA – to help me out. Otherwise I imagine I’d be a lot more Picasso-ish. My next step was something like this:

This went on for about 9 months. And then a very stressful thing happened. I was born. I’m glad I don’t remember it, because I’ve seen the process in person 3 times and I still can’t believe this happens. Since I was a C-section birth, I never experienced the natural process. I have to imagine that it was like being sucked into a very small and slimy pipe, by the head. It would be very claustrophobic and scary. And then really cold. It would probably be like going from a nice hot tub at 100 degrees into the freezing winter air. With no towel. Or clothes.

After being in the larval stage for about a year, I eventually learned to constantly fall forward, interrupting my inevitable crash back to the planet with one foot at a time. Walking was cool and all, but running around like a little madman was more my style. After half a decade of crashing into things and people, I started to look like this:

So now I look like this:

So that’s who I am. Pretty much anyway. I have a lot of hobbies and interests that that keep me busy, so other hairless apes tend to call me different things at different times. The words that get used are: dad, professional engineer, sensei (bow if you must), husband, guitar player, teacher, tinkerer, fixer of leaky faucets, artist, asshole (usually just means I’m hungry), builder of things (sometimes), and killer of spiders (sorry – I didn’t want to but rules are rules).

What am I?

It might seem like I answered that above, but really I didn’t. I am a human, we can agree, but a human is just a big clump of smaller things called cells. Cells are just clumps of smaller things called membranes, cytoplasm, DNA, RNA and proteins. These are all just clumps of smaller things called molecules, which are just clumps of even smaller things called atoms. It’s a real Russian doll situation.

Since atoms are the smallest bits of stuff, that can still be called stuff, we can start there. I am, as you are, a bunch of atoms. Atoms are just stardust. And since I have a unique characteristic (for a mammal from Earth anyway) called consciousness, I can say what I am: Self Aware Stardust.

Like all humans, I am made of mostly Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorus. Those elements make up around 99.2% of my body. There are a lot of other atoms that make up much smaller pieces:

As you can see, around 10% of the human body is Hydrogen. Most of the Hydrogen in the Universe was made during the big bang. For me, 10% of my body is roughly 19.5lbs (8.8kg) of Hydrogen. Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear blast ever recorded, converted just 5lbs (2.3kg) of Hydrogen to Energy.

The immense amount of potential energy sitting in your chair is staggering.

Some of these elements are created in stars in a process called fusion. This happens when the immense gravity within a star squishes Hydrogen together, releasing a lot of energy in the process. Squish two Hydrogen atoms together and you get Helium, squish Helium and Hydrogen atoms together and you have Lithium, and so on*.

_{*It’s way more complicated than that.}

As a star uses up all of its Hydrogen, it is the beginning of the end. It’s going to die soon(ish). But before that, it will start fusing heavier elements together, all the way up to Iron (Fe) in the list above. Then the exciting part:

When a star goes supernova, we get that fancy phrase in the list above: explosive nucleosynthesis. If that sounds like nuclei are synthesized from an explosion, it’s because that is exactly what it means.

This explosion has so much energy that it squishes a bunch more atoms together. We now get to have more stuff – elements heavier than Iron. The dust from that explosion, along with a lot of energy and neutrons, gets flung out into space. The dust will form a nebula, which can then go on to form more stars and planets.

Billions of years ago those dust clouds formed our Sun and our planets. Our planet survived a violent early solar system. That time was chaotic, with all kinds of these clumps of stardust forming bodies like meteors, comets, and proto planets. These things smashed into each other and spread material around, not unlike my 5 year old self.

Eventually, Earth grew up and things cooled down. At first not much exciting happened. Then, and I don’t know why or how, this non-living planet came alive. Something happened to create a group of chemicals that did something strange: they started to partake in their own creation. It might have been because meteors that crashed to Earth had the right nucleobases – chemicals necessary to build DNA – and that the early Earth had just the right environment to kick off this odd reaction.

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

-Alan Watts

Billions of years later, and presto, here I am. A clump of atoms, squeezed into molecules, composing membranes, cytoplasm, DNA, RNA and proteins, that replicated themselves trillions of times, to create cells and tissues, to make my body. My body is not static, but a constantly flowing thing.

This all requires a constant stream of other atoms to flow into my body, while another constant stream goes out. All of these vast and intricate patterns rely on other vast and intricate patterns in order to keep the process going. And all these patterns are in constant flux.

So what I really am, then, is a flowing pattern of stardust.

Where am I?

Well that’s easy, I’m right here. When I think about it, there is nowhere else for me to be. ‘There’ doesn’t exist. Every time I want to go to some ‘there,’ as soon as I arrive, I find myself in just another ‘here.’ Since my own mind is the center of this aperture which the universe uses to view itself, I’m forever trapped right here.

I am not going from place to place, I am moving a planet below my feet to bring places to me.

Perhaps that answer may not be very satisfying to you. However, to me this is profound. I often spend a lot of my time in a mind-blown state over basic aspects of reality. My goal in this blog is to help you to see the world like I do. To start seeing the magic in the mundane. Or, if you’re already seeing it, to give you some ways to express these things which may also be amazing to you.

But I digress. Let’s talk a little more specifically about where I am.

For starters:

This is not funky 1970’s shag carpet under a microscope. Or a network of neurons. It’s what the Universe (maybe) looks like if you could zoom out far enough. The fibers you see are galaxy filaments, and the dark areas are unimaginably vast empty spaces. Some up to a billion light years across.

This image is obviously not an actual picture of the universe, it came from a computer calculation called the Millennium Simulation. In other words, it’s complete guesswork, but based on the best information available at the time.

Let’s zoom in a littler further:

We are starting to see things a little closer, but still it looks like it could be a neuron, or something else. And not very helpful if we are going to meet for lunch. You’ll need better directions than “Meet me at that little spec in the middle of that yellowish blob.” We need to zoom into it further:

Finally, we are getting close to me. At least we can see which blob I’m in now. That red circle? I am in that local galaxy group. As any child knows (hopefully) we live in the Milky Way galaxy. Which sort of looks like this:

Hey there’s the Sun! Finally I know where I am; in one of the many spiral arms of our galaxy. You are familiar with our solar system, so we’ll just cut to Earth now:

I currently live in Chico, California. I have lived in a few different places on this pale blue dot though, from my birth in Alaska to a two year stint in Nebraska. I’ve lived in trailer parks, suburbs, and for a short time in someone’s garage.

Growing up I went to 9 different schools. Most of this time I lived in California. My first year of high school was in Nebraska, then I moved back to rural northern California where I went to a high school named, and this is not a joke, Weed High School. Weed High. That’s really the name of a real high school. I played football, which involved me crashing into people, so naturally I enjoyed it.

In my life so far I’ve been a short order cook, a waiter, a busboy, a dishwasher, a corn de-tasseler (don’t ask), a construction laborer, and a telemarketer. I sold knives, I worked at Taco Bell and Dominos and Burger King. I worked for a pizza place, I managed a pizza place, I worked for a moving company, and a lumber mill. I worked in a soils and concrete laboratory, I’ve worked as a Civil Engineer for the Federal Government and a county government. Then I started an engineering business to work for myself, and I’ve taught classes in 3 different departments at California State University, Chico. And now, I’m writing this blog. Who knows what I’ll do after that?

When Am I?

This is a weird question, and one people don’t ask. You would probably be more interested in knowing how old I am. I could just say “I’m 39 years old” and leave it at that. But as you’ve already seen, my brain doesn’t work that way.

When I think about time, I find a similar conundrum that dawned on me with the ‘where am I’ question. As I can’t be anywhere but here, I can’t be any when than now. I’m trapped in one eternal now. If you are a natural born smart-ass, like me, you could give that answer to anyone who asks you what time it is. It won’t help them at all, but you’d be technically correct.

Let’s look at where I am in time:

I am sitting at the end of all time, for now anyway. The line above represents every time since time was a thing. Starting at the big bang and moving until right now, my entire lifetime would be a microscopic sliver at the end. Since I’m still participating in my own self assembly, I get to stay at the end of this line. When that line starts travelling past the point which my body stops self replicating, it’ll mean that I’m dead. For now I get to surf the edge of the big bang.

As far as age goes, we are typically referring to when our bodies began self assembling. For me that was at some point in 1983 when my parents did the dirty deed, two cells combined and, well you saw what happened. In July of 1984 I emerged, ready to crash into things and people.

For the sake of this article, let’s assume that I live 90 years. Currently the average life expectancy for a man in the United States is around 75 years, so I’m banking on good health practices and advancing medical science to get another 15 years. But who knows? Mortality is a thing.

Let’s zoom into the end of the timeline above:

My body has been doing its self replicating thing for 38 years, but my atoms have been around longer than that. Much longer. We established earlier that something like 10% of my atoms are from the big bang. So 10% of me is around 13.7 billion years old, and parts of me are definitely feeling it. Usually in the lower back.

The other atoms are younger because they had to wait patiently in line to get fused in the middle of some stars. The rest had to wait a bit longer to get exploded together into heavier elements. Some of the atoms in my body came from the Sun, just this morning, so they are relatively young. Age-wise, I’m all over the place, and the question becomes more muddled than we assumed before.

So when am I, in other times scales? We can zoom back out and see my time compared to the age of the United States:

At 38 years old, I’ve been around for 15% of the time the United States has existed. Which is kind of a large proportion since the US is a fairly young country. I’ve only been around for about 3.5% of the time England has existed, assuming Wikipedia is correct that it was founded in 927AD. So how about my age compared to modern civilization?

That little red line is my lifetime compared to the start of civilization as we know it. Of course, we don’t really know it that well. In fact this timeline is likely out of date, since the discovery of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey suggests that there may have been a much older civilization living almost 12,000 years ago. How about my age compared to the age of the Earth?

At this scale, there is no more red line. It’s microscopic in this view of time. This timeline really makes me think. Most life as we know it appeared during the Cambrian Explosion. Why? How come life was apparently around for billions and billions of years before it got all complicated and started putting feathers on everything? These are the things that keep me up at night.

Well we’ve got this far, might as well go all the way. This next one is a real mind blower, if only because there’s no possible way to imagine these time scales. They are simply too big and my ape brain is just too dumb to really grasp it. But here goes:

With the exception of the Primordial Era that was only a puny 380,000 years long, these Eras are too vast to imagine for beings as short lived as we are.

I think we are pretty much at the beginning of the Stelliferous Era, the age of stars. Once the last new stars are made, after 10¹⁸ years, there’s the Degenerate Era, which sounds rough. Everything will decay away until nothing is left but Black Holes, after 10³⁹ years.

Time-out.

I’m casually typing 10³⁹ years like it’s no big deal. Maybe you slept through your high school chemistry class. I know I did, but that’s only because it was taught by a football coach who once said “sugar is sugar” to explain how the body gets energy. Anyway, that’s a 1 followed by 39 zeros. It looks like this:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (aka Duodecillion).

You could say that this is a thousand million million million million million million years. You could save a few seconds by saying a thousand billion billion billion billion years. It is so absurdly large that we have to make up silly sounding words like Duodecillion just for numbers this big. We have to use math in our writing even to express it, which makes me suspect that numbers secretly hate us.

The next mind boggling amount of time will see those black holes eat up all the rest of the matter in the universe. When they are finally full and ready to pass out watching TV on the recliner, they will effectively evaporate with the last one popping out of existence after 10⁹² years, give or take. That’s such a large number of years that we haven’t even bothered to make up a name for it. At this point we’ve reached the heat death of the universe.

Well that got dark. Literally.

Will this really happen? I wrote it as if it were a certainty, but no one can say with 100% confidence that this is the ultimate fate of the universe. Theories about this will inevitably change someday, perhaps even radically. This will happen after we learn something new, and we will, especially with projects like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that was launched last year. It has already given us amazing views of the universe, like this one:

These current theories are humanity’s best guess at the moment. But not everyone is in agreement that this will happen exactly this way. If you’re now a little freaked out by all of this, for a brighter future you could look to the Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose for some light.

He believes that when that last black hole pops out of existence, our universe will have nothing left but photons. Since photons do not have any mass, and we need mass in order to have time, this means we have reached the true end of time. Also, since there’s no time, there is no measurement. So the concept of scale has even left town.

Now here’s the crazy part. Photons can only travel at the speed of light, but they don’t ramp up speed to get there, they just immediately start at that speed. In his words¹ “Photons get right out to infinity without experiencing any time.” He goes on to say “As long as you don’t have any mass in the world, infinity is just another place.”

So nothing but massless photons are now just chilling in infinity, which is a place. “What I’m saying is that…infinity can be thought of as a boundary.” He then asks “…And you have to think, what is on the other side of this boundary?” If we could somehow be outside of this we’d actually be able to see this as a boundary to the place where these photons are hanging out.

He proposes that the other side of this infinity boundary, is another big bang itself. Not our big bang, but one that succeeds ours in an infinite cycle he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.

Put simply this means that the conditions of the big bang have been re-created. And it all starts again.

So that’s nice.

Why am I?

Why am I what? ‘Why am I’ is not a question, but the first part of one. And I intend to explore a lot of them with this blog.

Why am I conscious?

Why am I in a culture which feels like it is in constant crisis?

Why am I so disillusioned with politics?

Why am I drawn to the theory that many religions may have begun with experiences brought on by psychoactive plants/fungi?

Why am I of the opinion that the placebo effect may be one of the most profound, yet ignored, phenomena in medical science simply because it can’t be patented and sold for large profits? I guess I kind of answered my question with my question on that one.

If you liked this Introduction article and want to tag along while I ask questions like this and more, then stick around.

Until then, just remember:

• You are the living, breathing universe.
• You are a flowing pattern of stardust, surfing the edge of a rippling wave called the big bang.
• You are the universe, come to life to experience itself from your unique perspective.

If that doesn’t amaze you, perhaps nothing will

_{1. Dialogue taken from the Lex Fridman Podcast with Sir Roger Penrose. I highly recommend it.}