SEOUL, October 12 (AJP) - Most of the atoms in the human body were forged inside stars that burned out long before Earth existed, a former Kookmin University president told students in Seoul on Oct. 8.
Stars make heavier elements by fusing lighter ones in their cores. When the largest stars run out of fuel and explode as supernovas, they scatter oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and iron into space, where the material is drawn into new stars, planets and, eventually, living things. Hydrogen, the most common atom in the body, is the main exception. It dates to the Big Bang itself.
Lee Sung-woo, the ninth president of Kookmin University (KMU), made the case in a talk titled "Looking into the Mysteries of the Universe and Life," the 672nd session of the school's Thursday Special Lecture series.
Lee is a civil engineer by training. He graduated from Seoul National University in 1974, earned a doctorate in civil engineering at the University of Southern California and became the first KMU president from a science or engineering background when he took office in March 2008.
Speaking in the university's academic conference hall, he started with the body. Oxygen and the other materials that make up living things were created in space, he told students, before turning to DNA, the molecule that carries genetic instructions, to explain how those materials keep an organism alive.
Human life, he said, is the product of the universe's long history and the slow evolution of matter. Understanding the universe and life is therefore a way of understanding human existence.
He then walked through the observations that built the modern picture of the cosmos. Edwin Hubble showed in the 1920s that the Milky Way is one galaxy among countless others, and his work led to the discovery that the universe is still expanding.
Lee used black holes, supernovas and the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang that still fills space, to trace roughly 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.
Set against that scale, humans are insignificant beings, little more than dust, he said, according to the university's account of the lecture. Scientific inquiry into the universe, he added, leads people to look back on their own existence and to stand humbly before nature.
The final part of the talk turned to threats to life on Earth. Lee described past mass extinctions caused by asteroid impacts and climate swings driven by shifts in Earth's orbit and the tilt of its axis.
He warned that global warming and shrinking glaciers are now raising sea levels and altering ocean currents, changes he said could endanger ecosystems and human survival.
He also discussed the possibility of life beyond Earth and the missions searching for it. No evidence of life anywhere other than Earth has yet been found.
Lee closed by urging students to draw fresh insight from scientific discovery and use it to contribute to society.
KMU launched the Thursday Special Lecture in 1994. The university says it was the first regular course at a South Korean university built on weekly talks by outside speakers, and that it has run longer than any other.
About 680 speakers from politics, society, science and the arts have taken its podium, including the late President Roh Moo-hyun, Cardinal Stephen Kim Sou-hwan, writer Yoo Si-min, film director Park Chan-wook, former National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun and former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert.
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