Stardust
In 1970 the band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young released their version of a Joni Mitchell song called “Woodstock”. In it were the lyrics:
“We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden”
Stardust? Carbon? Didn’t God take a lump of clay and mold it into Adam? Nope. If you look carefully at Genesis 3:19, the text says: “for dust you are”; notice, it doesn’t say clay; clay contains only a few elements, some of which are not found in humans. So, what does it matter? Is it true; are we really made of stardust? You might be surprised at the answer. Let’s look a little deeper.
Most people would be familiar with a period chart of elements. If asked where these elements came from, most would answer ‘the earth’, of course. But where did earth get these elements? Eventually the trail would lead to the stars, the manufacturing sites for all elements in the universe. Four of these elements, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen makes up 95.7 percent of each one of us. Calcium, phosphorous, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium account for the next 3.8 percent, followed by 25 trace elements, most of which we cannot live without. Let’s examine one of those trace elements, iodine. The amount of iodine in your body is calculated by dividing your body weight by 2,500,000, about enough to cover a pinhead.
When I was a kid, I fell off my bike and cut my knee. I ran to my mother to fix me up; of course, she went directly to the medicine cabinet and pulled out a bottle of iodine. What happened next was a bunch of crying and screaming; iodine is an antiseptic that really stings while its killing the germs. Far more important is the role iodine plays for human health, specifically in the thyroid gland. Iodine is essential for making thyroid hormone; a deficiency of iodine can result in a condition known as hypothyroidism. Some symptoms of hypothyroidism are: weight gain with poor appetite, hair loss, skin disease, pericardial effusion, poor memory, coldness, fatigue – you really don’t want this condition!
God had a most unique plan to manufacture iodine; astronomers call it the r-process, shorthand for ‘rapid neutron capture’. Turns out that iodine is the byproduct of one of the rarest known astronomical events, the collision or merger of two neutron stars. A neutron star is the tiny remnant from the supernova (explosion) of a star three times larger than the Sun. Neutron stars have a diameter of 7 miles, weigh 4 times more than the Sun, are so dense that a softball would weigh 10 trillion tons, have a surface temperature over 10 million degrees, and spin at a rate of 43,000 rpm. Hard to imagine!
Point of interest: August 17, 2017 at 12:41 universal time astronomers observed their first-ever merger of two neutron stars; it occurred 130 million light-years from earth in the Hydra constellation. Next time you gaze into the heavens toward the Hydra constellation, thank God for his plan to give you iodine.
