The Early Bird Manufactures the Stars

Check it out.

Already by 12 billion years ago - less than 2 billion years after The Beginning - there were big bright galaxies cranking out stars like factories crank out carbon dioxide.

Oh, and stars, by the way, are HORRIBLE polluters. If you think Texas or our wage slave camps (factories) in China are bad polluters, get this: stars are responsible for dumping approximately 53,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 American tons (58,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms or 58,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons) of carbon* into the Milky Way over the last 13 billion years or so as a result of their nuclear helium-burning as they get old and rickety. Think of them as like those old black-smoking diesel trucks. And what becomes of all that black smoke? Well...the stupid black smoke blocks astronomers' view of distant stars and galaxies, including the brilliant interiors of the galaxies mentioned in the articles above. But it also helps to make new generations of stars that burn cooler for their mass (but still produce ridiculous amounts of pollutants).

Maybe they should put some emissions inspections on stars, and find a clean way to take them off the sky when they start to get old and rickety.

Or maybe not. 'Cause that pesky black smoke that blocks our view is also what we're made out of.

I guess pollution isn't always bad. But, being the selfish creature I am, I don't really care what kind of wonderful creatures might inhabit a world that we end up making uninhabitable to ourselves by rearranging all these elements made in heavily polluting stars into forms that do us in.

(*how I got those figures: I looked up the mass of the Sun and the percentage of that mass which was carbon to get the amount of carbon in the Sun. Assuming that the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way averaged the same percentage of carbon as the Sun, I multiplied the carbon in the Sun by 100 billion to get the amount of carbon in the Milky Way.)