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Why We Really Might Be Made of Stardust

Why We Really Might Be Made of Stardust

snuggle Dust (2025)

It is with a wistfully philosophical, utterly sincere attitude that the duo snuggle presents “Dust”, today’s song pick, as part of their series of recent single releases (suggesting, perhaps, another EP after Calendula (2023)? One can only hope!). “What’s left is ashes,” the song goes, and over a humming, restless production proceeds to tell the listener about endings and the infinite cycle of things un-existing and coming to be. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, right?

The practical-minded reader might want to brush this aside as a nice enough metaphor—it’s dust; seems pretty final—but a scientific study published in Nature Astronomy last year theorizes that dust might in fact be of the utmost importance for our actual cycle of life: In their paper, the interdisciplinary research team postulates that cosmic space dust might be the reason we have life on earth at all!

To make this argument, the study looks at sedimentary collections of cosmic dust existing on earth today (which apparently is a thing! There’s space dust raining down on us all the time!). Going off their findings, the researchers then theorize that such accumulations, if they formed at the right time in the right spot on the earth’s surface, might have supplied the necessary components to form life. An especially favorable place for this to have occurred, according to them, were shallow pools of melted water on glaciers.

Of course, the theory can never definitively be proven or disproven, but the team has continued their research on the topic either way—and in any case, we do recommend indulging in it when listening to snuggle’s “Dust”: In the face of such a perfectly depicted sense of thoughtful wonder, it seems only right.

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