I have never been really religous and had a belief in a God as I was brought up Catholic and it didnt make sense to me from a scientic point (walking on water and feeding 5000 with a couple loaves and fish, also the virgin birth).
Lately I have beeen toying with the concept of a higher power or creator
This struck a cord for some reason
I wish this could have gone on longer but the asshole host probably wanted to know the girls bodycount
Haha that was great! I've seen a video before with Andrew Wilson where a bunch of women walked out of the show. He knows how to push their buttons!
It's more likely that there is a Creator than not. And even if the atheists are correct that there is no Creator, then that version is just as fantastical as the Creator version. The Solar System and everything in it literally formed out of a dust cloud in space with the basic elements in the Periodic Table. Mostly hydrogen, but some heavier elements like gold (Au) as well. That gold was forged in the immense gravity of super massive stars' explosions that expired when they reached the iron stage.
Right before iron (Fe) in a massive star’s life, the core is dominated by silicon (Si) burning — though “silicon” here really means a mix of elements around silicon in the periodic table.
Here’s the fusion sequence in a massive star, starting from hydrogen:
- Hydrogen burning → helium (via the proton–proton chain or CNO cycle)
- Helium burning → carbon and oxygen
- Carbon burning → neon, sodium, magnesium
- Neon burning → oxygen, magnesium
- Oxygen burning → silicon, sulfur, phosphorus
- Silicon burning → nickel (^56Ni), cobalt, and iron (^56Fe)
That last step is the key:
- Silicon burning doesn’t directly fuse Si into Fe in one step — it produces nickel and cobalt isotopes via alpha capture reactions.
- The most common product is ^56Ni, which is unstable.
- After the supernova, ^56Ni decays → ^56Co → ^56Fe.
Timescales shrink dramatically toward the end:
- Hydrogen burning: millions of years
- Helium burning: hundreds of thousands of years
- Carbon burning: centuries
- Neon burning: about a year
- Oxygen burning: months
- Silicon burning: a few days (sometimes less)
So, before Fe is silicon (and a mix of S, P, and other intermediate-mass nuclei).
Once that phase is done, the star’s core is essentially iron/nickel — and that’s when gravity wins.
