Excerpt from THIS ORDINARY STARDUST by Alan Townsend, PhD
Read an excerpt of THIS ORDINARY STARDUST by Alan Townsend, PhD, a compassionate exploration of scientific wonder that offers a hopeful, fresh perspective on healing from grief and navigating through the dark periods of life.
Decades ago, I became entranced by the stardust that resides in all of us. I sat in a California lecture hall and listened to my biology professor talk about the ways we pass that stardust not only between one another but to everything else on earth. About how those exchanges can happen in the tiniest of spaces or across the world, sometimes every second, sometimes not for millions of years. And about how our own species was rewriting the rules of the game.
It hooked me. And while the whole “we are made of stardust” thing is also a total cliché, when the lecture ended, I thought: that stupid hippie bumper sticker was a true and literal statement of who we are, our nature as well as our limits. When viewed in our most elemental form, people are trillions of outer-space atoms, moving around temporarily as one, sensing and seeing and falling in love. Then those atoms scatter, joining one new team for a bit, then another. Far from depressing, I found this notion profoundly comforting. Sure, “I” the atomic collective wouldn’t be around all that long in the grand scheme of things — but my atoms would, forever remixing and reencountering one another. I thought: No matter what happens, we’re still here. And we always will be.
Our never-ending story began at the dawn of time, when the formation of the universe blew out clouds of hydrogen and helium. For a while that’s all we had, barring a few traces of lithium and beryllium. Then things cooled off a bit as stars were born and coalesced into galaxies. The heat inside those stars became cosmic ovens in which the lightest elements fused into progressively heavier ones, including the stuff of life. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Along with hydrogen, these elements are most of me, you, your dog, and your houseplants.
But it doesn’t end there. Like a meal without spices, we are nothing without twenty or so other elemental building blocks, arranged in myriad combinations that create the mind-boggling array of life on this planet. Forging the raw material to build that life took the heat of those long-distant stars, including some truly blistering ones that would put our own sun to shame. To get oxygen or anything heavier, atomically speaking, you need a stellar oven that can dial the heat up past one billion degrees.
But even an unimaginably hot furnace doesn’t create a very interesting world on its own. Life is what makes the whole recipe transform into something unexpected and miraculous. Living things, simply by going about their daily business and then passing on, exchange the planet’s stardust not only among one another but into rocks and water and air, seashells and coal and carbon exhaust. As we have for billions of years, we the living send stardust out, take it back, hold it for a while, and send it out again. A constant rhythm of movement, rot, and growth marks every minute, hour, year, and generation. One by-product of all that movement? In your lifetime, you might contain some part of every human ever.
I dove into the study of these elements, and the deeper I went, the more fascinating it became. The world was connected in ways I never dreamed. For example, forests near my Hawaiian birthplace depend on elements contained in dust that blows all the way from the deserts of Mongolia. They also rely on the ocean below them, for other elements that move from sea to air before raining back down to bathe their roots. And the distribution of the elements in the soils below those trees could reveal secrets about how past Hawaiian societies had lived and perhaps why they succeeded or failed.
The hidden secrets of life’s elements helped me appreciate how every one of us, and every living thing, exists because of communities each life form helps to construct and sustain, and also because of ones we will never know, some of which flourished and then disappeared a very long time ago. Humans carry around an uncountable number of bacteria that constantly take up a few of our elements, give them back, and in so doing help us digest our food, ward off disease, and generally make it through the day. In the middle of the Amazon rain forest, there are trees that may owe their existence to species of lumbering animals that are now extinct but who once would carry nutrients from the rich soils of the lowland riverbanks to the more impoverished interior, depositing them into the soil in their excretions and ultimately from their decaying bodies. Those same trees are also literally coated in bacteria and fungi, many of which help them access the very elements they need to survive.
I began to realize how tracing the elements of our lives shows us how we are all just moments in time, but ones that reflect a richness of stories that precede our existence and others that will continue well after we are gone. The study of these elements — the science I have pursued for decades now — is known as biogeochemistry. The word is overly stuffed with prefixes because it is part biology, part geology, part chemistry, part a whole bunch of other things too. At times physicists joke that every other branch of science is a subsidiary of their own, but biogeochemists have a good hand to play here. Given long enough, the elements that assemble life can pass from pretty much anything and anywhere to anything and anywhere else. They connect us to their galactic birth at the beginning of time and to the entirety of the world. Mary Oliver put it beautifully in “Sister Turtle,” one of the essays in her book Upstream:
All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.
The science of biogeochemistry has much to teach us. Why this cornfield needs more fertilizer than that one. Why too much of that fertilizer will kill sea life hundreds of miles away. Why one lake looks pea green and another cobalt blue. Why our ancestors flourished in one place and not in another. Even why our planet is warming.
Biogeochemistry also shows us the inevitability of life’s ebbs and flows and that not all swings are the same. Some- times, the rules of the game are changed in a hurry, and every- thing and everyone must scramble to adjust. Oxygen fills our atmosphere. A massive volcano eruption or meteor strike blocks the sun. Plants evolve and spread around the world. Humans arrive and largely just hang around for millennia, then trans- form the entire planet in only a few generations.
But it took my world being ripped apart for me to realize one of the most important lessons of my science, of any science: it can nurture the soul.
That lesson didn’t come quickly. There was no lecture hall aha moment. For years I believed that science held the keys to nearly every answer humanity sought but that those answers were about solutions — technical, medical, environmental — not about a way of being in the world. I was sure that science could, with sufficient knowledge, explain our planet and our- selves and predict so much of what might come next. And I thought that was its essential purpose: no more and no less.
To be fair, what science can predict, answer, or invent is astonishing. But an evangelistic belief in science as the source of all answers is both limiting and dangerous. In part, that’s because science is a field created and practiced by human beings, which means it’s often a mess. Its miracles sprout at less-than- predictable times and from an ample crop of failure, and that’s just the beginning of its problems. Science is replete with histories of oppression, abuse, exclusion, and violence.
Yes . . . and here’s what I sometimes tell students who are embarking on a scientific path: this wild, chaotic, painful, loamy field is also the site of humanity’s greatest potential, whether we’re talking about each of us as individuals or all of us together as humankind. It’s where we can turn our love for one another into tangible and practical service. Science invites us to sow all that is best about us — curiosity, caring, altruism — and in time, with luck, reap the kind of innovation that saves and nourishes not just our loved ones but millions of other people too.
I believe this because I was reminded in the most agonizing way possible what it really means to be a scientist. It’s not an achievement, a role, or a superior understanding; it’s a process, a way of observing and existing in the world. It isn’t about being any less pathetic or mortal than anyone else; it’s about getting away from our own ego and learning to wonder — no matter what hits may come — in the teeming, crushing, profound, gorgeous, surprising, and extraordinary world that is.
Because in time I came to see that far from antithetical to faith or spirituality, science offers hope that life on earth can make its way through the eye of any needle, that our individual choices matter, and that love can bring us back from the brink of annihilation. A scientist’s mindset doesn’t just involve finding cures and creating new technologies; it can be, if we let it, a practice of spiritual self-salvation. An act of love.
I’m not a Christian. I don’t go to church. But as I’ve learned — sometimes painfully — science and religion have far more common ground than I once thought. If, as the biblical Paul wrote to the Corinthians eons ago, love is patient and kind, insisting not on its own way but rejoicing in the truth, then perhaps there is no purer form of love than science. It is an act of profound attention and empathy. It requires a willing- ness to come back and back and back to a problem, no matter how numerous or embarrassing your failures, in the quest for a solution. Science is the discipline of figuring out the things one can change and learning how to work with the things one can’t. On so many levels, these are lifesaving skills.
I didn’t see it this way, not yet, when seven simple words changed my life:
We found something on your daughter’s MRI.
“An extraordinary, powerful book” – David Quammen, author of The Heartbeat of the Wild and Breathless
A compassionate exploration of scientific wonder that offers “a fresh perspective on life, death, and the bittersweet consequences of impermanence,” (Jon Krakauer) as illuminated through the tragic dual cancer diagnoses of author Dr. Alan Townsend’s wife and daughter.
A decade ago, Dr. Alan Townsend’s family received two unthinkable, catastrophic diagnoses: his 4-year-old daughter and his brilliant scientist wife developed unrelated, life-threatening forms of brain cancer. As he witnessed his young daughter fight during the courageous final months of her mother’s life, Townsend – a lifelong scientist – was indelibly altered. He began to see scientific inquiry as more than a source of answers to a given problem, but also as a lifeboat: a lens on the world that could help him find peace with the painful realities he could not change. Through scientific wonder, he found ways to bring meaning to his darkest period.
At a time when society’s relationship with science is increasingly polarized while threats to human life on earth continue to rise, Townsend offers a balanced, moving perspective on the common ground between science and religion through the spiritual fulfillment he found in his work. Awash in Townsend’s electrifying and breathtaking prose, THIS ORDINARY STARDUST offers hope that life can carry on even in the face of near-certain annihilation.