An Interview With Graham Lau
Q&A style interview with Graham Lau, Director of Communications and Marketing at Blue Marble Space
You may have heard the phrase “we are star stuff”, but that’s not entirely true! Most of us is star stuff, but some of us came long before stars and some long after. All of the hydrogen and much of the helium in our universe formed during the Big Bang, and there’s a good chance that not all of that hydrogen ever went into stars. We likely have some primordial hydrogen in us that was never inside of a star at all. Also, while many of our elements came from the nuclear processes within stars and during stellar phenomena like supernovae, we also have some amount of carbon in our bodies that was formed very recently from cosmic rays striking nitrogen in our atmosphere (this is also why carbon dating works). Finally, there’s something called Bomb Carbon — this is carbon that forms during the detonations of nuclear weapons. It’s saddening but also intriguing to think that all of us have some amount of carbon inside of our bodies that formed during the detonations of two nuclear weapons in Japan at the end of World War II.