« We're all made of stars » -- artists say this often

Dust, points, particles

I hope it's a well-known fact that most of the constitutive matter of this planet, plants, insects and us has been crafted inside local stars.

All the stars except the Sun look like small white dots from here.

From the scale of stellar nucleosynthesis to the complexity of living organisms on Earth, thinking about the fact that everything is made of stardust can be exhilarating.

Dust has the double meaning of primordial particles (as not-yet-assembled) like atoms, molecules and biological cells, and the one of already-decomposed teleological ashes like micro-fragments of our furnitures and fabric, sand grains, skin scales...

I find the term « stardust » plays a lot on my ego. Being issued from something as impressive as big gigantic balls of nuclear plasmatic gas burning in space has the great potential to cheer me up, but being assimilated to « dust » feels sometimes unflattering.

Anyway, let's just end this ego-challenging discussion with the fact that most of our brain matter mass, is known as glial cells. These cells and stellar objects are visually very close in the scientific iconography. More of that, some of these neurons are called astrocytes and this special kind of neurons assemble together to form the astroglia. I'm not inventing it.

Fractal nature

«The symmetries of the causes are to be found in the effects.» --Pierre Curie, 1894

The binding electrostatic force acting on small things like molecules and cells can be compared to gravity at the galactic scale. It's no mystery that, having the same symetries in their causes, different phenomenons like galaxies and brain can exhibit somewhat similar shapes. No need to be a high school mathematician to see how close these two formulas are :

Where G is the gravitational constant (~6.67× 10−11 m3.kg−1.s−2), ma and mb masses of things, the u vector indicates the direction, and r is the distance between these two things.

Where kc is the Coulombian constant (the inverted vacuum permittivity ~ 9×10^9 N.m2.C−2), qa and qb the electrical charge of things and u vector the direction along the line between these two things, r their mutual distance.

For the non-initiated the first formula is just saying that the gravitational force I exerce on an apple is the same that the apple exerces on me. It says that this force is decaying quick when I'm far from the apple, and inversely growing quickly when I approach.

And, of course if we don't feel it, that's because the apple and I are rather non-massive compared to planets and stars. Fact.

Spacetime fabric

Back to our sand grains. Sand grains are small fragments of bigger rocks, eroded and carried away by wind and water. This enters the teleological side as something that has been thrown into parts. Something that had a macroscopic scale in the past just became... dust.

But that's not all. If we look at sand grains with a more creative state of mind, they can also be seen as aggregates that we can mix together with cement to make concrete. And build things, like houses or cities.

The same happened to create the atoms that builds us. A star blew up somewhere in a big explosion and the excited matter cooled down to form small particles like calcium, sodium, carbon, and iron atoms. The dead star disintegrated itself in small building blocks that some forces helped assembling and gluing together to form new things like proteins, cells, etc.

Talking about cells, it's no surprise that our neurons exhibit somewhere the same construction-destruction processes. Cells grow, die, and are disintegrated by immune cells, and recycle. Neurons also form connections between them, make them evolve, grow as a web and sometimes some of these disappear, being remplaced by more efficient, or simply forgotten.

The weaving of our neurons, the weaving of the connections between all the scales we're talking about, is something that evolves.

If we look at spacetime as something in four dimensions, and our three-dimensional world as it appears, is just a slice of the spacetime, we can also look at the succession of the "now" moments as a chain of static pictures. If we rotate 90° and look the succession of these pictures on the side we can see links between the "now" things and their origins. We can see how every atom of everything inside and around us are linked to an exploded star, itself being linked in a distant past to some bigger explosion.

If we could rotate spacetime just a little, we could see how each one of the sand grains, no matter where it is now, has a link to a bigger rock somewhere in the past, and somewhere in space. (somewhatere in spacetime)

Generator / Interactive

This is a fully animated generator, click "run" to observe the animation. Use wheel to change the observation scale. Drag with right click to observe a different area.

This live animation is designed to be experienced fullscreen on a 16/9 screen at least full HD, and needs a recent (>2015) graphic card (GPU) to run smoothly at its cruise speed of 60FPS. Click "project" then "open" to see the live version in full window, or click HERE.

• Unlimited duration animation (no general loop, parameters are ever evolving)
• Written in Javascript and GLSL
• Uses WebGL thanks to the excellent three.js library
• More than 2.3 millions particles
• Each frame is a unique and deterministic generative composition
• Five equiprobable color palettes
• An infinity of initial conditions leading to an infinity of possible outputs ( ℵ ω)
• Dynamic point size (best fit for wide 16/9-16/10 screens)

Preview previews

This is an animation. The FxHash preview is a static FHD image issued during the first frames of a particular iteration. As they are impossible to see during the minting, here are some premint preview previews.

I hope you enjoy this experience ! 🧡

📡 You can contact me on fxhash discord or Twitter DM for any question or request.

[ Follow @HAL09999 on Twitter / Follow hal09999.tez on objkt ]