The other day I was reading about our continued struggle to rid (or at least to drastically reduce) our planet of fossil fuel. We have gone more and more into electric, through solar or wind production. We have used water in hydro-electric systems with turbines. We have used nuclear fission (splitting atom) using radioactive elements (Uranium, Plutonium), and we have been trying hydrogen-based energy. And that is where we stand currently.
Now, as you may already know, Hydrogen is the most abundant and ‘simplest’ element in the universe. Hydrogen constitutes about 75% of ‘non-dark’ matter, followed by Helium with 23%. By simple, I mean the number of protons and electrons, which in the case of Hydrogen is 1 and Helium is 2.
Now, the power plant at the heart of stars basically fuses Hydrogen atoms to get Helium and light/energy. At a later stage, Helium atoms combine to get the other elements, such as Lithium all the way to Iron. And finally, when the star explodes it creates most of the other elements in the universe. A few rare metal ones, such as gold, get created later in very special cases of stellar collisions.
And guess what? Aside from Hydrogen and Helium, which constitute 98% of the ‘visible matter’, the third and the fourth most abundant elements are Oxygen and Carbon! So look at this beautiful interaction: The 2 most abundant elements in the universe (and the simplest ones) provide it, and us humans by extension, energy, life and survival. Oxygen, is of course, also produced on Earth via photosynthesis, thus even if on the universe scale Oxygen is less than 1%, on Earth it constitutes 46% of the matter!
So the bottom line is that the universe has given us everything we need in abundance, but we behave like spoiled brats and bullies, instead of doing a better job at turning them into liveable life.
Paris, February 16, 2023
Zeejay