Stick with me on this, it’s a good one …

Stars are the furnaces of creation—in their life and in their death.

All the elements on the periodic table (118 at last count) are the byproducts of stars. Yet, in a star like our own Sun, there are only a handful of elements being “cooked up”. Made of mostly hydrogen and helium, our sun will live out most of its life (about 90%) by first burning the hydrogen, then the helium. That’s what we’re all enjoying right now: very little change over a long period of time. In the process, it forges and adds a few more elements to the mix: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, argon, chlorine, potassium, calcium, scandium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel … and finally iron. Yes, finally iron. All these elements are critically important, but such a small list falls woefully short of what’s needed to make a great universe.

With most of the critical elements left uncooked our star will not be able to overcome “the iron wall”. Iron will build up faster and faster, causing our sun to cool and die. It just can’t create enough heat or pressure to forge a single element beyond iron … and iron will be the death of it.

Fortunately, for the sake of the rest of the universe, that’s not the end of the story. The massive deposits of iron in our sun’s core will condense toward the center with unbelievable pressure. The iron core will then bounce outward with such super-heated, explosive force that, in its death, it will obtain the necessary heat and pressure to instantaneously forge massive quantities of all the other elements. The explosion itself—a super nova—will then seed those elements throughout the galaxy. The stars form a few of the elements over their long consistent lives but most of the elements are created in their radical, paradigm shifting, explosive deaths. Super-nova.

Is it just me or does this not seem vaguely familiar? Human history, from its dawning until very recently, has moved at a slow, constant, reliable pace. Neither upsetting the flow of the ancient world nor producing many new “elemental” changes. Then comes “iron”—the age of the machine, the industrial age—and everything begins to change. Our lives changed in incalculable ways because of industrialization but, not long after it took hold, we began to realize that the fires fueling the change are not sustainable. There’s no going back, there’s no getting beyond the iron wall. Unless …

Unless hidden in the death of industrialization lie the crucial elements needed to re-create the world. The information age has come like a super-nova and it is changing everything. Information cultures, information economies, and now too, information-based industry. We will never be the same. The old star is gone, now comes the day of the super-nova.

The cultural super-nova has just begun. It’s a whole new world with a whole new set of rules that we’ve not yet to begun to discover. We’ve no idea where it’s all going or how it will change the face of humanity, but what we do know, what should be obvious to all, is that it will indeed change the face of humanity … forever.

For those who insist on staying behind and dreaming dreams of iron, the world will end. For the rest of us, hopefully, if we turn with the shock-wave and move with all of our strength we might be able to ride it into a new universe of possibilities. I’m going for it. It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it … and I feel fine.