Ashes to Ashes, Stars to Stars: What Heaven and the Square Root of –1 Have in Common
- Aug 30, 2025
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 31, 2025
At the risk of triggering impassioned mansplaining from my solar physicist dad and astronomer big bro, I must proceed with a topic I’ve always meant to write about.
My father once explained to me how he thinks of heaven. Like the sqrt{-1} — an “imaginary number” — the concept of heaven is a way for humans to comprehend something that is bigger than what our brains can understand. We need some kind of sensory framework, hence bright lights, pearly gates, harp music, divine presence.
Every atom in our bodies—all the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, calcium, and whatever makes up our souls—were once part of stars. And someday, the stars are where we will return.
In billions of years, the Earth will be engulfed by the sun, as the latter becomes a red giant, its outer layers expanding into a gaseous blur. All life will be incinerated, and a glowing miasma of gas and dust will spread into the galaxy, scattered by the intense solar winds, before finally we all drift off into interstellar space.
Over millions and billions of years, our atoms can mix into new clouds of gas and dust, which may eventually collapse into new stars, planets, and perhaps even life again.
And so it will come to pass that we will return to what we started as—stardust floating in a void that has no known beginning or end. Amen indeed.
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