Three episodes of The Known Universe was on Nat Geo HD last week, so I recorded them.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.co...known-universe
They are really basic programs, and i'm sure pretty much everyone in this thread would find them kind of boring since we know basically all the information they're telling us already. As I was watching last night I would finish their sentences for them because it was obvious what they were going to state.
Anyway, one thing did pique my interest, and that was when they were talking about how the universe recycles everything.
We all know everything in the universe was "born" out of the big bang. Everything that exists now is from then.
What i'm having trouble understanding and wasn't really aware of was the recycling that the universe does. In the program, they made it seem like there is a constant amount of matter. That atoms are neither lost or gained since the beginning of the universe, but rather rearranged and recycled. Atoms are blown up and fused all the time, and these combinations make up the elements. But these atoms have been around forever, and will always be around. Just in different combinations.
Carl Sagan said we are all star stuff, and I just took that to mean that basically we were created here on earth because of a supernova that took place somewhere near by 5 billion years ago which caused our solar system to form.
Yet, if it is indeed true that no atoms are lost or gained, and that they are always around, then that means that the oxygen i breathe and the water i drink are made up of atoms that made up someone or something else on this planet or in this universe at some point.
They said on the program that basically, when you drink a glass of water, you are drinking atoms that were once a part of a star, which I understand, but I didn't fully comprehend maybe. And that when you breathe oxygen, you're taking in a couple atoms that passed through the most famous people to ever live.
It doesn't totally make sense to me because don't atoms decay? We know they do, and they do at a predictable rate. So if they decay, I suppose they decay into a smaller atom? Atoms are not lost or gained, rather re arranged again. Is that correct?
We all know everything came from the big bang. But that doesn't seem significant to me. It just seems so far removed. Like so much has changed since then. But when I heard that the atoms that were born then (few hundred million years after the big bang I think) are the exact same atoms that are floating around now and make up me and you, that kind of puts a different spin on things. Not so much an evolution into us, rather just a rearranging into life.
There's my rambling for the day.