#guy murchie

Art by Susan Seddon-Boulet

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Quoting geneticists, Guy Murchie says we're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murchie also describes our kinship through an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and—owing to the wind's ceaseless circulation—over a year's time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who ever lived. Right now you may be carrying atoms that were once inside the lungs of Malcolm X, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra.

A Map of the Sun by Auctore & P. Scheinero, 1635

[In The Music of the Spheres, Guy Murchie] describes the surprising lack of density in certain stars, even when those stars, nonetheless, seem structurally coherent to an outside observer. He explains, for instance, that the surface of the sun "is really a thousand times more vacuous than a candle-flame on Earth, and even the concentrated moiling gases hidden a thousand miles below it are a hundred times thinner than earthly air." In fact, other stars—such as E Aurigae I, so huge it could "contain most of our solar system, including the 5.5-billion-mile circumference of Saturn's orbit"—are often "described as 'red-hot vacuums,'" Murchie writes, "because their material, though hot, averages thousands of times thinner than earthly air and is normally invisible, so that you might fly through them for days in your insulated space ship without even realizing you were inside a star."