A few years ago, I was on a quest to break myself of my childhood heroes. One of the ways I did that was to find some ‘flaw’ that could remind me that they’re human.
Carl Sagan was one of mine. I investigated “We are all made of star stuff”, which I’d heard others repeat through the years, assuming Carl Sagan was the origin.
But through some investigating using Google Books and such, the earliest similar thing I could find was from 1918. So, basically, they all ultimately copied off of this guy and this talk (which is fine but it succeeded in breaking the spell a little of my “hero that could do no wrong”, which is what I wanted)
1918: the President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Albert Durrant Watson:
“It is true that a first thoughtful glimpse of the immeasurable universe is liable rather to discourage us with a sense of our own insignificance. But astronomy is wholesome even in this, and helps to clear the way to a realization that as our bodies are an integral part of the great physical universe, so through them are manifested laws and forces that take rank with the highest manifestation of Cosmic Being.
Thus we come to see that if our bodies are made of star-stuff,—and there is nothing else, says the spectroscope, to make them of—the loftier qualities of our being are just as necessarily constituents of that universal substance out of which are made
“Whatever gods there be.”
We are made of universal and divine ingredients, and the study of the stars will not let us escape a wholesome and final knowledge of the fact.