We are Stardust - On Being an Octillion

January 13, 2026

We are Stardust - On Being an Octillion

The current best scientific estimate is that the human body contains about 30 trillion human cells. There are also about the same number of bacterial cells living in and on you. This is 30–40 trillion extra bacterial cells mostly in the gut, but also on the skin, mouth, and throughout the digestive tract. Each cell individually is composed of more atoms than there are stars in the Milky Way which means that an average human contains roughly an octillion atoms. Written out as a whole number, that is one followed by twenty-seven zeros.

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Each of those atoms is seemingly unremarkable on its own. None carries a label that says “human.” They are generic, ancient, universal building blocks. None belongs to you in any permanent sense. And yet, arranged for a brief interval, they give rise to sensation, memory, intention, love, fear, and the awareness of being alive.

An atom is almost entirely emptiness, imagine a football stadium’s worth of space with a nucleus the size of a grain of sand at the center, held together by invisible forces that whisper where things may and may not be. Since the body is woven from roughly one octillion of these airy structures, nearly all, 99.9999999999999% of what we call “ourselves” is spaciousness arranged into the pattern of form. The solid world we trust is an agreement between fields, a choreography of repulsion and attraction that behaves like, and appears to us as matter.

Were you to gather all the nuclei of your body, their true substance could rest in something smaller than a grain of dust, yet here you stand, a coherent architecture of open space made of almost nothing. We are patterned emptiness, luminous shapes pressed into being by the quiet insistence of attracting forces. In that sense, “as above, so below” becomes a simple truth: the universe and the human share the same grammar of space and shimmer, presence made from almost nothing, yet capable of everything.

More surprising is the speed at which this assembly changes. On the order of ten quintillion atoms pass through your body every second.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000

Breath by breath, sip by sip, meal by meal, you are continuously dissolving and reforming. The body does not endure by holding itself together through stasis, but by engaging in an immense, ceaseless exchange. What we call a self is not a fixed object but a process, a moving pattern maintained through flow.

We are taught, to imagine ourselves as bounded things. Separate. Discrete. Self owned. Yet at the atomic level, the boundary between inside and outside is porous. The oxygen you inhale was recently part of the atmosphere, and shortly will be again. The carbon in your muscles once belonged to plants, soil, animals, oceans, and stars. The body is not an island. It is a nexus of crossings.

The materials that compose us are ancient, recycled, and shared. Nothing about them is private. Every human body is a temporary borrowing from a planetary commons that long predates us and will long outlast us. This does not diminish our human life. It situates it. It reminds us that our presence here is temporary and participatory rather than proprietary.

Another conclusion concerns identity. If the atoms that make up your body today will mostly not be the ones that make it up a year from now, then identity cannot rest in material continuity alone. What persists is not substance but pattern. Memory, habit, temperament, and intention are not things stored in atoms but arrangements enacted through time. We are closer to a song than a statue. A symphony carried forward in the ever changing air.

There is also an ethical implication. To harm the environment that feeds this exchange is, in a very literal sense, to harm ourselves. Polluted air, poisoned water, and degraded soil do not remain “out there.” They pass directly through us, atom by atom, cell by cell. Care for the Earth is not a sentimental ideal. It is self-care extended to its true scale.

Additionally, there is a quiet invitation embedded in this knowledge. If we are already this fluid, this interconnected, this transient, then perhaps we can loosen our grip on the fiction of control. Perhaps we can live with a little more attentiveness, a little less fear of change. The body itself demonstrates a remarkable truth: continuity does not require permanence. Stability arises from complex relationships in constant movement and transformation, not isolation.

To know that you are an octillion atoms in motion is not to feel insignificant. It is to recognize your sheer magnitude, that significance does not come from being separate from the world, but from being so thoroughly, intimately woven into it that for a time, the universe learns to look out through your eyes.

The phrase “as above, so below” takes on a different gravity once one realizes that there are more atoms in a single human body than stars in the observable universe. What once sounded like metaphor begins to read as correspondence, a resonant motif across scales.

The universe above is vast, luminous, and widely spaced. Space itself is expanding endlessly. Stars drift in immense distances, bound by gravity into slow, patient architectures. The universe below, within the body, is just as ancient and just as numerous, but folded inward. Atoms are densely gathered, layered, and intimate. What is spread thin across cosmic distances is compressed into an endlessly unique living coherence.

Both are patterns rather than objects. A galaxy is not a thing so much as a temporary arrangement of motion and force. A human being is no different. The distinction is not one of kind, but of register. One unfolds across space. The other unfolds across experience.

At every scale, the same tendencies appear. Attraction gathers. Structure stabilizes. Exchange prevents collapse. Nothing is fixed. Everything persists by remaining in motion. The laws that shape nebulae are not replaced when life appears. They are refined, constrained, and brought into a closer intimate conversation.

This reframes smallness. To be small is not to be insignificant. It is to be concentrated. The universe does not become more meaningful as it grows larger. Meaning intensifies where relationships become denser, where feedback tightens, where awareness can arise by proximity.

The stars may be where the universe learned how to shine. Living beings may be where it learned how to notice that it shines.

In that sense, “as above, so below” does not describe imitation. The small does not copy the large. The large and the small are continuous expressions of the same unfolding reality, repeating its themes at different scales, exploring what presence feels like under different conditions.

Above, the universe explores itself through distance, light, and time.
Below, it explores itself through sensation, memory, and wonder.

One is expansive. The other is inward. Neither is complete without the other.

To be an octillion atoms arranged into a living form is not to stand apart from the cosmos. It is to be one of the places where the cosmos has folded itself tightly enough to become aware of its own immensity.

So the ancient phrase shifts its meaning. It is no longer a mystical slogan pointing upward and downward. It becomes a recognition that wherever one looks closely enough, whether into the night sky or into the fragile density of a human life, the same intelligence is already present, speaking in different scales of the same language.

So the conclusion? We are all continuously unique expressions in the middle of one infinite being folding and unfolding itself.

Woodstock

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, “Where are you going?”
And this he told me

I’m going on down to Yasgur’s Farm
I’m gonna join in a rock and roll band
I’m gonna camp out on the land
I’m gonna try and get my soul free

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you?
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog
In something turning

Well, maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden