70 Octillion

 In one of Sam Kean’s popular books on science, Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Air Around Us, he makes the fascinating point that your next inhalation may very well include molecules of the air expelled with Julius Caesar’s last breath. The human body contains an estimated 7 octillion atoms -- that is the number 7 followed by 27 zeros. Preservation of mass means that these are atoms that have been in existence for billions of years. Everything we see and touch and ingest and inhale is ancient. We are literally made up of star-stuff.

In the mid-20th century, man found out how to make certain elements lose mass -- nuclear fission. The rush to do that involved a terrible war and the prospect that our enemies would beat us to unlocking the secret. Of course, it was a race that the United States (with help from our allies and scientists expelled from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) won. On 16 July 1945 the first nuclear device, called The Gadget, exploded in New Mexico. Only 1.06 kilograms of the 64 kilograms of uranium underwent fission in Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima; the entire release of energy consumed about the weight of a butterfly (half a gram). Humanity began to live under the cloud of nuclear weapons on 6 August 1945. Three days later, a second bomb destroyed Nagasaki. Total casualties are staggering; between 110,000 and 210,000 are estimated to have been killed. Those closest to the detonation point were, in a word, vaporized, as many photos reveal. The 70 octillion atoms of those people ascended and became part of Earth’s atmosphere, to be recycled at some future point into something else.

Many books have been written about Hiroshima, including some published last year on the 75 anniversary of the bombing. Perhaps the best book is still the first, John Hersey’s Hiroshima published in 1946 as a full edition in The New Yorker and still in print today. Read it and Lesley M. M. Blume’s Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World to understand how the world changed 76 years ago. But lest you think there are no other horrors to contemplate, remember that the conventional use of fossil fuels gave us the plumes of smoke that were the murdered of Auschwitz, the plumes of smoke over Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and countless other instances where inhumanity occurred. And include events like the lynchings that were inflicted on Blacks for many, many decades -- with many innocent people burned alive.

As Sam Kean points out, we have breathed the atoms of those who came before us. Their star-stuff resides in us all. Perhaps occasionally remembering this will spur us to treat other humans as we want to be treated and to remember that nations, religions, and cultures are artificial inventions. Take a deep breath now and contemplate.