Your body is amazing. Not yours personally (well it might be…), but the body in general. While you will likely take your body for granted, occasionally working it hard in the gym to make sure that it looks its best and does what it’s supposed to do, for the most part you will likely just kind of ‘assume’ it’s going to work and not give too much thought as to how it all happens and just how incredible it actually all is.
Well here we shall put that to rest and spend some time really looking at the incredible-ness of the human body and what makes it such a marvellous piece of engineering.
Where Do You Come From?
Maybe you think you know where you come from, and maybe you can trace yourself back a few generations. However at the end of the day where you really come from ‘originally’ is much more impressive and shocking.
Your body is made up of protein, and this protein is made up of amino acids which in turn are carbon compounds. In short then you are made up of the substance carbon, which is the same element found in our air (global warming) and in diamonds.
When you eat protein our body basically takes the amino acids from that source and then uses them in order to reconstruct your body. In other words then you literally are what you eat. So when you eat a piece of Beef, you are using the parts of that cow to make your own tissue. That means that particles inside of you have been parts of cows, and have been parts of pigs, chickens and more. At the same time though those particles were something else before they were parts of cows, meaning that you can trace some of the carbon inside you back through the entire circle of life. In short, there are parts of you that were probably once dinosaurs – which really is incredible when you think about it.
How Deep Does the Rabbit Hole Go?
Things get weird than that though too. Because before your atoms belonged to dinosaurs, and the plankton that lived on Earth before dinosaurs had even evolved, you need to think about where it was before that point.
No one knows the answer to that question definitively, but we can say with almost certainty that if you were to trace back your carbon compounds far enough, you could go all the way into space and into the heart of a dying star.
In order to form carbon, which has an atomic value of 6, you need incredible amounts of heat and pressure – which can’t be found anywhere on Earth. In fact the center of our own sun doesn’t have enough energy to create carbon and neither do other stars in the universe. The only place where this kind of energy exists is in the hearts of dying stars called red dwarfs, and this means that all of the material that makes up your body was forged in the heart of a dying star. Starting to feel a bit like Superman yet?
From there your carbon molecules then travelled through space, most likely on an asteroid or meteorite and will have crashed down on Earth. But who knows, before that it could have crashed down on any other planet – it may be that you are partly formed of deceased aliens.
And as though all this wasn’t strange enough, it’s also true that every single atom in your body will be replaced every 10 years. In other words, not one part of you is the same as it was ten years ago, and so by most definitions you are not you.
Be good to your body, because in short: it’s a miracle.
Pauly Singh works as a professional fitness consultant and likes to share views on fitness on his blog. He also writes good elliptical reviews on his blog to help buyers.
