Accretion

How a ring of dust around a young star became the only place anyone has ever been.

IDust · 4.568 billion years ago

Before there was ground, there was dust.

A young star, still wrapped in the cloud that made it. Grains of ice and silicate circle it in rings — touching, sticking, growing. A pebble in a thousand years. A mountain in a million.

IIFire · 4.54 billion years ago

Every collision left heat behind.

Mountains fell into mountains until gravity took over and the largest swallowed the rest. What it swallowed, it kept as heat: an ocean of magma at two thousand degrees, under a sky of vaporised rock.

IIIWater · 4.4 billion years ago

Then it rained, for a very long time.

The crust cooled and the vapour came down. Basins filled with a green, iron-rich sea beneath an orange haze. Somewhere in the warm shallows, chemistry learned to copy itself.

2.4 billion years ago · the Great Oxidation

Life breathed out, and the sky turned blue.

300 000 years ago

And then, rather suddenly — us.

IVHere · today

A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

Seen from six billion kilometres, everything that has ever happened to us — every ocean, every war, every song — fits inside a single pixel. Less than one, in fact: 0.12 of a pixel.

Voyager 1 · 14 February 1990 · words after Carl Sagan
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