The Universe Exists Within Your Skin

Beauty, as seen by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

We started as singularity. We as in everything — every last lifeless and life-filled form in the cosmos. 

Scientists have theorized that all the matter and energy of existence was once contained in this single point, this singularity, this infinitely dense and unfathomably hot and highly unstable spot. Then the Big Bang happened. The singularity stretched and cooled, expanded and evolved, spread into apparent separateness. Elements collided and commingled, creating other elements that collided and commingled, creating stars and galaxies and planets and comets and more stars, stars, stars.

Singularity is just one theory. It might not be the right theory. We’ll likely never know for sure how it started, only that it started, and there were stars.

The earliest stars were made of the lightest elements. Hydrogen, helium, lithium. They burned and they burst, every star death seeding new stars and new elements — stars sprinkled with nitrogen, carbon, magnesium, and more. They existed and erupted into supernovas. Their star stuff was swept out into space, again and again and again. Over billions of years, that star stuff formed spinning rocks and solar systems. It formed earth. It formed us.

Modern science has traced the origin of every element in the human body back to space. You are, quite literally, the remnants of exploding stars.

The universe exists within your skin.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

This is what I thought of when NASA released the first image from its James Webb Space Telescope yesterday; “the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.” It “covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.” It shows “the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.” It is “the farthest back we’ve seen in our cosmic history.”

“The Pythagorean term for beauty was ‘cosmos,’” writes John Armstrong in The Secret Power of Beauty. This gave way to “cosmetic” — cosmetic products, cosmetic procedures, cosmetic surgery, cosmetic industry, cosmetic injury — a word, today, so far from where it started.