…Really COOL Stuff… from Stars

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called “Home Soil,” the crew of the starship Enterprise run into a life form that, when they finally figure out a way to communicate with it, calls the humans “ugly bags of mostly water.” It’s a great line, but it’s also true: we ARE mostly water.

In fact, if you break down the elements in our bodies by how much there is of each one, you get this list:

• 65% oxygen
• 18% carbon
• 10% hydrogen
• 3% nitrogen
• 1.5% calcium
• 1.0% phosphorus
• 0.35% potassium
• 0.25% sulfur
• 0.15% sodium
• 0.05% magnesium
• A mix of copper, selenium, fluorine, chlorine, molybdenum, iodine, cobalt, manganese, and iron that comes to about 0.70%
• Another mix of lithium, strontium, aluminum, silicon, lead, vanadium, arsenic, bromine that are in very small trace amounts

So, we ARE mostly water, when you combine the oxygen and hydrogen to make H₂0. Our skin, organs, muscles, bones, and nerves basically give the water a place to hang out. Now, the interesting thing is that, aside from the hydrogen, the rest of the stuff all comes from stars. Some of those elements are cooked up inside stars like the Sun. Others come from stars that exploded as supernovae. Each of those kinds of stars spent a long time converting fuel to heat, and in their old age, they blew off clouds of material that included these elements.

The late astronomer Carl Sagan coined the phrase “We are star stuff” to explain how we came from the stars, albeit in a very long, long birth process. A bunch of stars had to live and die in order to make the “stuff” that is in our bodies, that makes up our planet, and even our Sun. It’s great stuff, this starstuff!

By Offering Prizes to Meet a Challenge

So, will the next steps on the Moon be taken in order to win a $30 million X-prize? If Google has its way, it will. They’re offering that much money to whoever gets the first privately funded robotic rover on the Moon by the year 2012. It’s a great prize, although it probably won’t cover the actual costs of the rover. It almost really doesn’t matter if it does, though. It’s the spirit of the thing that really counts. That a foundation and a company would be willing to put their money with their mouth is speaks volumes about their commitment to moving humans ahead to explore the near-Earth environment. And, to do that, some radical moves need to be taken, both in funding and incentives as well as in the actual technology to do the job. In the history of technology, sometimes really good solutions have come about because of competition and pressure to do a job well. And, as we know from the history of space travel so far, the spinoffs benefit education, medicine, and many technologies we take for granted in our daily lives.

The X-Prize foundation doesn’t just fund competitions for space travel, although their first big one, the Ansari Prize to prove that personal, affordable space flight is achievable. It went to Spaceship One and Mojave Aerospace Ventures, led by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen. It was a private team and they achieved a major breakthrough in space travel. If you go to the X-Prize Foundation’s web site you’ll find X-Prizes for a variety of other challenges: genomics and automotive breakthroughs, to name a couple. You can even suggest an X-Prize challenge, something breaktaking, audacious, and visionary. That’s what it takes: an idea and a chance to push it through. Sort of like going to the Moon with a lunar buggy.
There it is—let’s go!