Another “not my day job” essay squeezed out of me. It started because a reader asked for a sequel to “The Creator’s-Eye View,” and I realized that piece left a giant hole unfilled. Today I’m filling it. Also, a book recommendation: Dan Levitt’s What’s Gotten Into You. I lost two nights of sleep after finishing it. This one’s long — bear with me, you won’t regret it.
I. Link to heading
In “The Creator’s Perspective,” our hero Fat Jin’s brain short-circuits on the subway and he blurts out the eternal question: “Why do some piles of star-ash get to force the rest of us into 996, while we’re the ones stuck grinding?” “We’re all made of the same ash, aren’t we?”
Great question. But then I stumbled onto an even better one — exactly how many kinds of ash are we talking about?
The answer floored me: about sixty.
II. Link to heading
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen — these four make up 96% of your body mass (hence “carbon-based life”). Does that remaining 4% really need fifty-six more elements to round it out?
Turns out, yes. And these aren’t “trace amounts” in the polite, ignorable sense — they’re the “skip one and you die” kind of trace.
Here’s a fun party trick: if you extracted every element from a standard 68-kilogram human body and sold it at market price, you’d pocket roughly ¥10,000. The carbon alone makes about 11 kg of charcoal, the salt fills a whole shaker, the iron forges a 7.6 cm nail — all cheap stuff. The real money’s in the boutique items: zinc, copper, manganese, selenium, iodine, cobalt, molybdenum… names you’ve never once thought about at breakfast.
III. Link to heading
Here’s the part that actually kept me up: these sixty elements weren’t made in one event. They come from wildly different chapters of cosmic history — several events separated by billions of years, manufactured in batches, shipped separately, and somehow all crammed by sheer cosmic coincidence into the one meatsuit you’re currently using to read this sentence.
Let’s walk through the delivery manifest in chronological order.
Shipment 1 — Fresh off the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. Hydrogen and helium, the universe’s original two elements, finished cooking within the first three minutes after the Big Bang. 65% of the atoms in your body are hydrogen. Every single one of them is 13.8 billion years old. (Next time someone calls you “young,” tell them your atoms are older than their solar system.)
Shipment 2 — Stellar-core factory output, several billion years ago. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur — the actual construction materials of your body. These came from the cores of first- and second-generation stars, which spent billions of years fusing hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon and oxygen, before finally dying and scattering themselves into interstellar space. The calcium in your skeleton, the phosphorus in your blood, the sulfur in your muscles — all dead-star ashes.
Shipment 3 — Supernova crime scene, irregular supply. Iron, zinc, copper, manganese, chromium. Fusion hits a wall at iron — it’s the dead end of stellar nuclear economics, energetically unprofitable to go further. But heavier elements can only be forged in a star’s final, violent second of existence. When a star more than eight times the sun’s mass can no longer hold itself up, its core collapses in under a second, then rebounds — and that explosion runs hot enough to hammer iron into heavier elements, which get flung across the galaxy, drift for billions of years, and eventually land in rock, ocean, food chain… and, eventually, on your dinner plate.
Shipment 4 — Neutron star collision, extremely limited stock. Iodine. Yes, that 20 mg sitting in your thyroid — less than half an aspirin’s worth. Its origin story is the most violent event on this list: two neutron stars (the ultra-dense corpses of dead stars) spiral into each other under gravity and collide at near light-speed. The whole event lasts a few milliseconds. But in those milliseconds, temperatures exceed a trillion degrees, and heavy nuclei get slammed together in a frenzy — gold, platinum, silver, iodine, all products of this cosmic car crash. In 2017, gravitational-wave detectors caught one of these collisions directly, 130 million light-years away. A microscopic fraction of the iodine it produced eventually drifted into our solar system, dissolved into Earth’s oceans, worked its way through seaweed and fish into the food chain… and landed in your thyroid, where it’s currently regulating your metabolism.
IV. Link to heading
Now let’s talk about the luxury goods currently residing in your body.
Zinc: 2 grams, running 70 chemical reactions. You’re carrying 2–3 grams of zinc — about half a thumbnail’s weight — but over 70 enzymes depend on it, including every enzyme that copies and repairs your DNA. It’s basically running your genome’s read/write system.
Cobalt: 1 milligram, the soul of vitamin B12. Your entire cobalt budget is 1–2 mg, and nearly all of it lives at the core of a B12 molecule, sitting there like a tiny king. Lose it, and B12 stops working, the insulation around your nerve fibers starts flaking off, signals short-circuit, and the damage becomes permanent.
Selenium: 15 mg, tightrope-walking between poison and cure. This is the one that unsettles me the most. Daily requirement: 55 micrograms. Toxic dose: 400 micrograms. Selenium clears the toxic “exhaust” produced by cellular respiration — without it, your cells slowly cook themselves in their own metabolic byproducts.
Molybdenum: 0.3 mg, a three-event cosmic collaboration. You need about 0.3 mg in your entire life, all for one job: detoxifying sulfites from food into harmless sulfates. Without it, sulfites build up in a newborn’s brain and the baby typically doesn’t survive past a few weeks. That 0.3 mg was jointly manufactured by three completely different nuclear processes — dying low-mass stars, supernovae, and neutron star collisions.
V. Link to heading
Now let’s revisit the elements you think you already understand.
Iron builds blood, calcium builds bones, sodium and potassium regulate blood pressure — not wrong, but roughly 10% of the actual story.
Iron: not just an oxygen courier. Hemoglobin’s iron doesn’t simply “grab” oxygen — it toggles precisely between two charge states, grabbing oxygen in the lungs and releasing it in the muscles. Iron is simultaneously your courier, your power plant, and your firefighter.
Calcium: the most misunderstood element. “Calcium builds bones” — true, but that’s actually its least urgent job. 99% of your calcium sits in your skeleton as inert building material. The busy 1% — about 10 grams of free-floating calcium ions — is what’s actually doing the work. You think you’re controlling your muscles; really, you’re controlling calcium ion traffic.
Sodium and potassium: your nervous system’s power supply, not a blood-pressure dial. “Sodium and potassium regulate blood pressure” is maybe 10% correct. The fuller picture: sodium and potassium jointly maintain a constant voltage difference across every neuron’s membrane — a tiny battery, always armed. When a neuron fires, that battery fully charges and discharges in under a millisecond. That’s a nerve impulse — the physical substance of every thought you have and every blink of your eye. Running this system eats 20–40% of your brain’s total energy budget.
Magnesium: the underrated boss behind the scenes. Everyone knows magnesium deficiency causes cramps. What’s less known: ATP, your cells’ energy currency, is functionally worthless without magnesium’s “stamp of approval.” Every joule of energy your body spends has to clear magnesium customs first. (Bonus fact: the atom sitting at the dead center of chlorophyll is magnesium — capturing light energy in plants, using the exact same logic iron uses to capture oxygen in your blood. Every time you eat leafy greens, you’re eating the core metal of a photosynthesis rig.)
Copper: the structural engineer keeping you from falling apart. Literally — copper deficiency first shows up in your connective tissue, which starts to fall apart. Copper “knots” together collagen and elastin fibers into networks with real tensile strength. It’s also involved in converting dopamine into norepinephrine — directly tied to mood and stress response. (Also, modern chips use copper for their wiring skeleton — which is why everyone gets excited whenever chip stocks come up.)
VI. Link to heading
Now, the real question. Why didn’t the Creator just simplify the recipe? Isn’t carbon-hydrogen-oxygen organic chemistry enough? They can already form all kinds of long chains. Why recruit elements from five or six completely different chapters of cosmic history into one impossibly complicated machine?
The answer is buried in the deep ocean, 3.8 billion years ago.
VII. Link to heading
When life began, there were places on the ocean floor called alkaline hydrothermal vents. No sunlight, high heat, but insanely rich in minerals. Iron, nickel, zinc, molybdenum — metal ions seeping up from Earth’s depths, forming a concentrated “metal soup” in the cracks of the surrounding rock.
That’s where early life crawled out.
The enzymes doing the most critical jobs in modern human cells still have reaction centers built around iron, nickel, zinc, and molybdenum atoms — chemically identical to the minerals in those ancient hydrothermal vents. Life’s first “tools” weren’t proteins. They were minerals. Life didn’t choose these metals — it crawled straight out of them.
VIII. Link to heading
Today, if you peer at a mitochondrion — the power plant inside every one of your cells — under an electron microscope, you’ll find a structure in its electron transport chain called an iron-sulfur cluster. A tiny cluster of iron and sulfur atoms, dozens of them per mitochondrion, ferrying electrons and driving energy production.
This is functionally the same chemistry that was happening on the surface of pyrite crystals in 3.8-billion-year-old hydrothermal vents. Your mitochondria are still running on Earth’s original mineral recipe. And once evolution locks a system in, changing it becomes nearly impossible.
IX. Link to heading
So “why not simplify” actually has a cold, hard answer: because simplifying is dying.
Metal ions can do something carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen chemistry never can: switch smoothly between different charge states, ferry and accept electrons at minimal energy cost, and catalyze at body temperature reactions that would need hundreds of degrees in a lab.
Plain organic chemistry is too slow. Too imprecise. It can’t keep pace with the speed and precision demanded by 3.8 billion years of evolutionary arms race.
So life’s trajectory was never toward simplicity — it was toward recruiting the best tool available from every chapter the universe had to offer, one at a time, and forging them into a machine that leaves you speechless.
That machine is you.
X. Link to heading
Which brings me back to something I wrote before, an essay called “Is Moore’s Law Actually Dead?” It ended with two images comparing chip elements. Looking at them again today, they suddenly feel eerily meaningful.
The first image: elements used in early chips. A handful. The dawn of semiconductors was just doping a single silicon or germanium crystal and calling it a transistor.
The second image: elements used in modern advanced-node chips: silicon, germanium, hafnium, cobalt, ruthenium, tungsten, tantalum, nitrogen, oxygen, indium, gallium, arsenic… practically covering half the periodic table.
My caption back then read: “Humanity has racked its brain to exploit every possibility on the periodic table. Given this spirit, do you really think Big Tech is going to give up on Moore’s Law that easily?”
At the time, I was thinking about the resilience of Moore’s Law. Looking at the same image today, I’m thinking about something else entirely — building chips and building human bodies turned out to be the exact same journey.
Starting from “just use silicon,” every time you hit a physical wall, you’re forced back to the periodic table to recruit another helper. Copper’s resistance spikes at nanometer scale? Bring in cobalt or ruthenium. Silicon’s gate leaks current? Bring in hafnium as a high-k dielectric. Electrons in the channel too slow? Swap in indium gallium arsenide.
This isn’t human genius. This is physics leaving you no choice. Every single element has its own bottleneck. Every breakthrough on a given performance axis requires finding the one element on the periodic table best suited to that specific job. So chips keep getting smaller — and the number of elements involved keeps going up.
3.8 billion years ago, life walked the same road beside those hydrothermal vents. Starting from simple iron sulfides, then adding zinc, cobalt, copper, selenium, molybdenum — every time a new biochemical function got unlocked, another element got borrowed from the table.
Evolution and engineering — two completely independent paths — arrived at the exact same destination: if you want to build something sufficiently complex, cell or chip, you eventually have to knock on every single door on the periodic table.
The human body took 3.8 billion years to recruit about sixty elements. Modern chips have taken seventy years and are racing toward the same number.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s the Creator’s universal invoice, issued to anything that wants to become sufficiently sophisticated — whether you’re carbon-based or silicon-based. The bill comes out the same either way.
XI. Link to heading
An ordinary human body — from the Big Bang, to the neutron star collision, to the supernova, to Earth’s formation, to the deep-sea vents, to the origin of life, to plants conquering land, to the food chain passing everything along — 13.8 billion years of history.
The atoms that make you up crossed billions of light-years, survived the deaths of multiple generations of stars, and then compressed themselves into this carbon-and-water sack currently standing in front of a mirror worrying about a receding hairline.
Thinking about this gives me a strange feeling I’ve never quite had before — not exactly wonder, not exactly awe. Closer to… absurdity.
The universe spent 13.8 billion years compressing itself into a shape capable of asking “what am I?” That shape is you.
Every trace element in your body is a souvenir from some chapter of cosmic history. Your thyroid holds a memento from a neutron star collision. Your mitochondria carry the mineral memory of an ancient seafloor. Your DNA reads and repairs itself using zinc delivered by a supernova. Every thought you’ve ever had is sodium and potassium — flung out by some star that died billions of years ago — flipping electrical potentials hundreds of times a second.
The shape you see in the mirror is one of the most complex structures of matter in the known universe. Not because the Creator got lazy and dumped the whole periodic table into a body at random — but because the universe spent 13.8 billion years assembling, one by one, the very best tools it had ever built, just to produce something capable of drinking coffee, texting, and binge-watching tik-toks.