In a moment of cosmic wordplay, I found myself chuckling at my own adaptation of the famous Latin phrase “Per Aspera ad Astra” (through hardship to the stars). My twist? “Per Astra ad Astra” – through stars to stars. But what started as a simple play on words opened up a fascinating rabbit hole about the very nature of our stellar existence.

You see, this isn’t just clever wordplay – it’s quite literally the story of our universe. Every heavy element in existence was forged in the heart of a star through stellar nucleosynthesis. Iron in your blood? Star-made. Calcium in your bones? Thank a supernova. We are, in the most literal sense, taking the path through stars to become future stars.

The poetry of this reality hits differently when you really sit with it. The original phrase “Per Aspera ad Astra” speaks to human perseverance, our drive to reach for the heavens despite earthly struggles. But “Per Astra ad Astra” speaks to a deeper, more fundamental truth: we are part of an endless cosmic cycle where stars create the building blocks for new stars, new planets, and new life.

Think about it – billions of years ago, ancient stars underwent the ultimate sacrifice, exploding in spectacular supernovae that scattered their enriched guts across the cosmos. These stellar remnants, now filled with complex elements, drifted through space until gravity worked its patient magic, pulling them together to form new stars, including our Sun, and planets like Earth.

And here we are, made of star-stuff (as Carl Sagan would say), looking up at the night sky and dreaming of reaching those very stars. We’re not just reaching for them – we’re returning to them. When our Sun eventually expands into a red giant and sheds its outer layers, the atoms that once made up our bodies will once again become part of the cosmic dance, perhaps one day forming new stars, new planets, and maybe even new life.

This cosmic recycling program makes me question the very nature of hardship and struggle in our journey to the stars. Perhaps the original “Per Aspera ad Astra” was missing something. The hardships we face aren’t just obstacles on our path to the stars – they’re part of the same fundamental process that created us in the first place. The intense pressures and temperatures that forge elements in stellar cores, the violent explosions that scatter them across space, the gravitational collapse that brings them together again – it’s all part of the journey.

“The cosmos is also within us, we’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” ~ Carl Sagan

So next time you hear “Per Aspera ad Astra,” remember that you’re already part of that stellar journey. You’re not just reaching for the stars – you are the stars, taking a brief pause in human form to contemplate your own existence. Through stars to stars indeed, in an endless cycle of cosmic poetry that makes me laugh at the beautiful simplicity of it all.

And maybe that’s the ultimate cosmic joke – we’re not just on our way to the stars. We’ve been stars all along.