• Question: What are humans made of?

    Asked by 246grak22 to Scott, Ry, Maggie, Hannah, Daniel on 10 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      We are made of organic material:
      This means carbon, hydrogen and a few things connected to them (like oxygen and nitrogen).
      I’m not an expert so I can’t go into much detail unfortunately, but pretty much all living things are made up of hydrogen and carbon. Carbon can only be made in the cores of stars, which means we’re all made of star dust!

      Great question,

      Ryan

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I’ll also add that we’re mostly water (about 60%, so Google says), which is super important for pretty much all life on Earth. So if we’re searching for other planets which might have humans (or something like humans) on them, we care a lot about how hot the surface is: if it’s too hot or too cold, you can’t have liquid water (so probably no humans, boo). Earth’s distance from the Sun is juust right (not too hot, not too cold), we say it’s in the “Goldilock’s zone” 🙂

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      Skin and bones and if you believe what the scientists say then ‘stardust’. Everything in us was made from the recycled material of exploding stars (also known as supernova)

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I also heard that we are mostly made up of water, with a few other things added into the mix!

    • Photo: Daniel Williams

      Daniel Williams answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      So we’re made of about 65% oxygen (which is mostly in water), 18% carbon (which is in just about everything which isn’t water in our bodies), 7% hydrogen (in almost everything), and just under 2% Nitrogen which is in lots of proteins.

      There are lots of other things which we might only have a few grams of in our bodies, and there’s a neat table of all of them on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body

      Of course, I’d like to hope we’re also made of things like “good ideas” and so on, but I don’t know what chemicals they’re made of.

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