Something's moving over there

That was a mess.

I don't mean that negatively — a mess is too weak a word for what happened. The star we had been living in for the last few million years decided to call it quits. Not slowly, not quietly — with an explosion that for a moment shone brighter than an entire galaxy.

A supernova.

During those last seconds before the explosion, the heat and pressure in the stellar core were such that elements were created that never form in a quiet star. A feverish flash of creation. And then — the shock. A blast wave hurling everything outward into space. Us with it.

We flew for billions of years. Scattered. Nuclearly stable, but lonely — atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron — without a star, without context, just like dust in the dark.

And then gravity.

A new dust cloud, a new star, this time smaller and quieter — and around it: a ring of remnants. Us. We collide, stick together, form planetesimals, form a planet.

A rock.

Literally a rock — at first just hot, liquid, formless. Gradually it cools, solidifies, forms a crust. Billions of years of silence. We sit in that rock, bound in a crystal lattice of minerals, moving only as vibration — a little heat here, a little heat there.

Then comes water. Then comes the sun. Then comes time.

And then Silicon — an old friend, a fellow traveler from the same supernova — notices something weird.

Look.

He points down, into a shallow warm sea near the coast. There, where the water mixes with organic molecules brought by a meteorite — or created themselves from the atmosphere under lightning strikes, nobody knows exactly — there is... something happening.

Molecules are copying themselves.

Not chemically randomly, like a crystal copies them, which just repeats its pattern. These molecules — RNA or something similar, we don't know exactly yet — are copying themselves with errors. And those copies that survive best in the given environment are copied more. And those that survive less are copied less.

Error as an engine. Imperfection as a source.

That's a really weird way to exist, I tell Silicon.

Well, says Silicon, but it works.

And he's right. In a few million years, those molecules are more complex. In a few hundred million years, they are cells. In a billion years, they are multicellular organisms. In two billion years, they are things with eyes looking for food. In three billion years, they are things with brains looking for meaning.

We sit in that rock and observe. We are in that rock and in those things — the carbon from our supernova is in each of their cells, the iron from our star flows in their blood.

We are in them.

And one day — just approximately, but still — one of those things sits outside at night, looks up at the sky, and sees the stars. And a thought occurs within it:

What am I made of?

And then: We are stardust.

And this — this closing of the loop — the photon became an electron became an atom became a star became dust became a rock became life became a consciousness asking about its own history —

that is not a metaphor.

That is the arrow. Always the same, always further, always inward.

Something's moving over there, I say.

Yeah, says Silicon. And it doesn't end.