Carl Sagan spoke these words in the television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), one of the most watched documentary series in history. The sentiment encapsulates Sagan’s lifelong mission to communicate the emotional and philosophical significance of scientific discovery.

The observation is scientifically accurate: the elements composing the human body — carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron — were forged in the nuclear furnaces of stars and scattered across space when those stars died in supernova explosions.