YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ A LOT ABOUT DIRT, which no one knows very much about. We don’t even know the real etymology of the word. It’s that stuff that won’t come off a collar. It’s what smells in a compost heap. It’s what blows around on the floor or makes the sheets feel gritty and slick. Its dog turds. It’s the stuff we walk on, and traditionally, it is where people plant crops, though nowadays of course hydroponics is supposed to make that grimy connection a thing of the past.
The truth is that we don’t know the first thing about dirt. We don’t even know where it comes from. All we can say is that it doesn’t come from here. Our own sun is too young and cool to manufacture any element heavier than helium. Helium is number two on the periodic table, leaving some ninety elements on earth that were not even made in our solar system. Uranium and plutonium, the heaviest elements that occur in nature, can be forged only in an exploding star, a supernova.
“We are all Stardust,” says a friend of mine. He understates the case. In fact, everything is Stardust.
How does the Stardust get here? “The interstellar medium is full of dust,” says University of Washington astonomer Donald Brownlee. “It’s what makes the dark line across the center of the Milky Way.” It is a line of dirt perhaps 65,200 light-years across, and 3.832 × 1017 miles long!
There are countless megatons of unknown dirt out there. The ejecta, dejecta, rejecta, and detritus of ruined stars, it floats around the universe until it enters a field of force. Force fields of any kind resemble spiderwebs. Some are concentric, some are spiral, others are like labyrinths. They are traces of the way that a force—magnetic, kinetic, gravitational—acts. Of whatever kind, they tend to catch passersby.
Imagine that the dust from a thousand different exploding stars has gathered along the weak lines of magnetic force in a spidery red nebula. A few light-years away another star explodes. The force of the bang sends out a shock wave that perturbs and twists the magnetic lines of the nebula, creating eddies and whirlpools, exactly like those in a river. In those eddies, the dust begins to gather. As it forms lumps, gravity for the first time becomes stronger than electrical forces. The process feeds upon itself, until spherical masses are formed.
If a very large mass accumulates, it may catch atomic fire and become another sun. If smaller masses form, they may become planets of solid, liquid, and gas. If still smaller, they may become the cold hunks of moons, asteroids, or comets.
Perfectly logical, right? Indeed, just as logical as those experiments in which flat squares of metal are coated with a layer of loose sand. When music is played at them, the grains of sand arrange themselves in simple, concentric shapes, as the otherwise invisible signature of those tones. Perfectly logical, but why does it happen?
Apparently, the universe sorts more or less dense matters for different purposes on different scales. At the scale of the sun, atoms can’t exist. Their electrons are blown off and ions constantly radiate from the sun, spreading through the solar system.
At the scale of the moon, matters are the contrary. They are loose and virtually inert. Meteor strikes have been stirring it up for about four billion years, so it is all thoroughly mixed. The solar wind constantly pummels it, embedding helium atoms in the lunar soil.
Who would expect something like the Earth to come between sun and moon? Nobody. The sun is all activity, the moon all passivity, but the Earth is both active and passive. In the course of its evolution, this compacted mass of interplanetary dirt called the Earth, has two primary products: soil and atmosphere.
From this point of view, life on Earth is a kind of machine for making soils and atmospheres. Volcanoes disgorge oxygen-poor, virgin mineral materials from deep inside the crust. Rising into the stratosphere, they pick up oxygen atoms and fall with them to Earth. Meanwhile, the green plants and the blue-green algae—where did they come from?—convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. Animals—what are they?—take the oxygen and convert it back into carbon dioxide. The result is a vast cell—the Earth itself, hurtling through space with its envelope of atmosphere and dust—that regulates the inflow of solar hydrogen and electronic energy and the outflow of energy made by combining these with the heavier elements of Earth.
As the beings that make up organic life continue to exist, evolve, and cover the Earth, they create a rich, stable atmosphere and rich deep soils. Only here on Earth does Stardust engage in this extraordinary array of self-organizing behaviors. Only here on Earth does it perform the ceremony of continually creating an atmosphere. Even our neighbor Mars cannot do so, because its crust has become an unbroken solid and volcanoes cannot exist there. Mars has no means of self-renewal, no connection between its depth and surface.
Why is Earth’s dirt special? To a scientific mind, it is hard to admit that we don’t, and possibly can’t, know the answer. Answerless questions are the best kind. What’s more, it seems that things that can’t be figured out can still be seen to be true. Confession, not of “sin” but of ignorance, and meditation, not on some mantra but on the created, yield results that are different from analysis, and much more powerful.
I confess that I do not know, and I begin to meditate upon the wonderful construction of this world. A different part of the mind seems to open. Things that once seemed trivial now assume their right importance, and coincidence reveals its purpose. “Faith,” as the early Christian says, does not mean “belief.” It means the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen.
It is all impossible, after all: the Earth, the dirt, and all these things that we do not know and that we did not make.
“Let us worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” says the psalm. What is beauty? Beauty is a sum not reducible to its parts. It is a perception of harmony in variety. What is worship? To worship means not to figure out, not to analyze, not to pin down like a dried butterfly on a grid, but to value. Deeply to value.