Every atom in your body—the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the carbon in your DNA—was forged inside a dying star billions of years ago. You are not just in the universe. You are the universe, experiencing itself.
All the energy that exists—every photon, every particle, everything that will ever be—emerges from a point smaller than an atom.
In the first 3 minutes, the universe is too hot for atoms. Just a plasma of quarks and energy. Then it cools enough for hydrogen and helium to form.
That's it. Just hydrogen and helium. No carbon. No oxygen. No iron. Nothing you're made of exists yet.
Gravity pulls hydrogen clouds together. Pressure builds. Temperature rises to 15 million degrees. Fusion ignites.
Hydrogen atoms fuse into helium, releasing enormous energy. A star is born—the universe's first element factory.
For billions of years, stars fuse hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into oxygen... building up the periodic table, element by element.
A massive star runs out of fuel. In milliseconds, it collapses and explodes—a supernova brighter than a billion suns.
The explosion is so violent it fuses elements heavier than iron: gold, silver, uranium. Things that can't form any other way.
Your atoms—now fully formed—are scattered across space at 10% the speed of light. They drift for millions of years.
A cloud of star-stuff—your atoms among them—collapses into a new solar system. Most becomes the Sun. The rest clumps into planets.
Your atoms are now part of a molten rock orbiting a young star. Over millions of years, it cools. Oceans form. Chemistry gets complicated.
Somewhere in that primordial soup, your atoms become part of the first self-replicating molecules. Life begins.
After 13.8 billion years of transformations—Big Bang to stars to supernova to planet to life to evolution—those atoms are arranged into you.
The energy powering your thoughts right now came from the Sun, through plants, through food. The Sun's energy came from fusion. Fusion came from gravity. Gravity came from the Big Bang.
Nothing has been added. Nothing has been lost. Just transformed, endlessly, for 13.8 billion years.
Energy changes form constantly. Every second, in your body and everywhere else:
Same energy, different forms. The photon that left the Sun 8 minutes ago is now powering your neurons.
Your atoms don't belong to you. They're on loan. When you die, they'll return to the cycle.
Some will become soil, then plants, then other animals. Some will wash to the ocean. Given enough time, some will return to space.
The same atoms will form other things—other lives, other stars, other worlds. Conservation is eternal.
Every atom in your body has existed for 13.8 billion years and will exist for billions more. Energy doesn't disappear—it transforms. You are a temporary arrangement of ancient star-stuff, borrowing atoms that have been countless other things and will be countless more.
This is what Pillar 4 is about. Understanding energy and transformation means seeing yourself as part of an eternal cycle—not separate from the universe, but made of it.