In its early years, Earth was a hellish landscape that gutted the Moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect, according to a CNN report. Later, it turned from a reservoir into a giant snowball that practically wiped out all living things from the face of the earth.

Then superhurricanes with waves up to 300 feet hit the newly thawed ocean. But this is nothing compared to the celestial turmoil and explosions 9 billion years before the birth of our planet.

Dan LeWitt’s forthcoming book What’s Got You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, From the Big Bang to Last Dinner, evokes a series of startling and often impressive images in tracing how cells, elements, our atoms and subatomic particles came to life. way into our brains, bones and bodies. The book comes out January 24th.

“Now we know that the origin of the universe, the creation of elements in stars, the creation of the solar system and the Earth, and the early history of our planet were incredibly turbulent,” Levitt told CNN.

However, almost incomprehensible explosions, collisions and temperatures were necessary for life.

A perturbation of Jupiter’s orbit, for example, could send massive asteroids to Earth, showering the planet with water. And the molten iron that forms the Earth’s core created a magnetic field that shields us from cosmic rays.

“So many things have happened that could have gone differently,” Levitt said, “in which case we wouldn’t be here.”

According to him, a step-by-step reconstruction of our people’s epic journey over billions of years filled him with awe and gratitude.

“Sometimes when I look at people, I think: “Wow, you are such an incredible organism; all of our people share the same deep history that goes back to the Big Bang,” he said. He hopes readers will understand “that even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and deserves a lot of respect. Like all people”.

star mystery

Our bodies contain about 60 elements, including hydrogen released from the Big Bang and calcium formed from dead stars known as red giants. Gathering evidence for how these and more complex organic molecules came to us, Levitt entered into a turbulent history of the scientific process itself.

Initially, he did not intend to draw a parallel between upheavals in the universe and upheavals in the scientific world, but, no doubt, this turned out to be inevitable. “So many scientific facts have been debunked since our great-grandparents lived,” he said. “That’s what makes the book interesting.”

After Levitt completed the first draft of the book, he was surprised to find that some of the scientific confusion was due to all sorts of recurring biases. “I wanted to look into the minds of scientists who made great discoveries, to see their achievements as they happened, and to understand how they were perceived at the time,” he said. “I was surprised that almost every time the first reaction to innovative theories was skepticism and rejection.”

Throughout the book, he points out six recurring…mental pitfalls that have blinded even the brightest minds, such as the notion that it’s “too weird to be true” or that “if our current tools don’t detect it, there isn’t “.

In fact, Albert Einstein initially hated, for example, the strange idea of ​​an expanding universe, and eventually had to be persuaded by Georges Lemaitre, a little-known but persistent Belgian clergyman and cosmologist. Stanley Miller, the “father of probiotic chemistry” who skilfully simulated early Earth conditions in glass flasks, was a notorious opponent of the hypothesis that life could have evolved in the deep ocean, fueled by mineral-rich enzymes and superheated vents.

“The history of science is full of great beliefs of the oldest statesmen, which will soon be refuted,” writes Levitt in his book. Luckily for us, the history of science is also full of radicals and freethinkers who amused themselves by debunking these truths.

Structural failure

Levitt described how many leaps forward have been made by researchers who have never been properly recognized for their contributions. “I’m drawn to unknown characters with dramatic stories that people haven’t heard of before,” he said. “So I was glad that many of the most compelling stories in the book were about people I didn’t know.”

These are scientists such as the Austrian Mariette Blau, who helped physicists see some of the first signs of subatomic particles. the Dutch physician and philosopher Jan Ingenhuis, who discovered that leaves can create oxygen through photosynthesis; and the chemist Rosalind Franklin, who was instrumental in developing the three-dimensional structure of DNA.

The spark of new ideas often struck the whole world. To his surprise, Levitt found that many scientists had developed plausible scenarios for how the building blocks of life could begin to assemble.

“Our universe is full of organic molecules – many of them are precursors to the molecules that we are made of,” he said. “So I’m balancing between the thought that beings like us are unlikely to exist and the thought that life must exist in many places in the universe.”

However, nothing was clear in our own post-Big Bang journey.

“If you try to imagine how life developed from the first organic molecules, you would think that it must have been a tumultuous process, full of difficult paths and failures,” Levitt said. “Most of them haven’t gone anywhere. But evolution has a way of creating winners through countless experiments over long periods of time.”

Nature also has a way of recycling building blocks to create new life. Nuclear physicist Paul Ebersold found that “we replace half of our carbon atoms every one to two months and replace 98% of all our atoms every year,” writes Levitt.

Like a house constantly being renovated, we are constantly changing and replacing old parts with new ones: water, proteins, even our cells, most of which we seem to replace every ten years.

Eventually, our own cells will grow quietly, but parts of them will reassemble into other life forms. “Although we die, our personalities do not,” writes Levitt. “They spin through life, soil, oceans and skies in a chemical carousel.”

In other words, just like the death of stars, our own destruction opens up another amazing world of possibilities.

Source: CNN