The cosmic nebula that you once were

"Most of the atoms that make up the Earth and its inhabitants were present in their current form in the nebula that collapsed out of a molecular cloud to form the Solar System," says Wikipedia. Each of the atoms that make up your body has been around on this planet for 4.5 billion years, and who knows how long for as part of the primordial molecular cloud that would eventually become the Solar System. Each of those atoms that are now part of you, or perhaps I should simply say are you, has its own history, alternating quiet periods with extremely hectic ones. Just think of the food you've assimilated from your last meal. Those proteins that are now part of your triceps were only a few days ago part of the hind legs of some cow in Argentina. That last bit of fat incorporated into your belly was months ago part of an olive growing on an olive tree in Greece. Some of the water molecules that are now inside your cells were a few weeks ago floating in the atmosphere above the Atlantic ocean, before it precipitated and rained into the reservoir that supplies water to the region where you live.

Those are just the first obvious and coarse steps in the genealogy of your body. I shouldn't even call it genealogy, because it's not that the atoms in you body descend from the atoms that made up the plants, animals and other stuff that you have made your own: they are the exact same atoms, give or take a few electrons. So then, if you go just a few days back in time tracing the location of all the atoms that are at this moment part of you body, you'll find little chunks of your future self scattered around the globe. Go back further and little chunks will become clouds of atoms, ever thinner and thinner, more and more scattered. Keep going back and you'll get to a point where most of your present body spreads over most of the surface of the Earth. Go back 5 billion years and you'll be scattered across light-hours of mostly empty space.

You can now fast-forward and contemplate how the chosen atoms of that nebula first become a massive lump of molten rock, then earth and atmosphere, then bacteria, insect, plant, river, bird, urine, shit, pig, bean, milk, raindrop, breath, cow, saliva, tomato, spinach leaf, and, finally, it all converges into you. Can you visualise that infinite backwards ramification of yourself into empty space and the forward converging of a nebula of atoms into your present body? Does it not feel like an absolute miracle? If that isn't enough complexity to blow your mind, consider not only the past history of the atoms currently in your body, but their future as well. Where will all the atoms that make up your body be in billions of years? Consider that if you go 10 billion years further back in time all the atoms in the nebula converge on the single point from which the universe exploded into existence, if that is indeed what happened, although they wouldn't be atoms at that stage. Consider the past and future not just of the particles currently in your body, but of every particle that has ever been a part of it. Consider also all the ususpecting atoms scattered around the planet that will one day become a part of you.

If you look at it from a deterministic perspective, you could almost say that those privileged atoms in the cosmic nebula were predetermined to one day become part of a conscious being who would be wondering where they were 5 billion years ago. Even if I try to stick to chance and physical laws to account for this process, it is almost impossible for me not to find meaning and purpose in it. You could say that meaning and purpose, if they weren't there in the first place, emerge from an ocean of chance and blind determinism, which is even more mysterious. Whichever way I look at it, I end up with the same sense of awe, which has an uncanny resemblance to a feeling of worship. But — ssh — don't tell anyone I said that.