This is how fluorine, a life-essential heavy element, is made: unlike other life-essential heavy elements made by supernovae explosions, fluorine is made in sufficient quantities only on quite rare an object: the surface of white dwarf stars bound into binary systems with larger star-companion, where the larger star must orbit closely enough to the white dwarf that it loses significant material to the white dwarf. At the surface of the white dwarf, some of this material is converted to fluorine. Then the white dwarf must lose this fluoridated material into interstellar space for it to be incorporated into a future solar system. This sequence means that the universe, our galaxy, and the sun’s position in our galaxy must assume narrowly specified characteristics if Earth is to obtain the fluorine it needs for the support of life (Hugh Ross).
MIND BLOWN.
When I sat in my favorite graduate building materials class (taught by my favorite Cambridge PhD) three years ago, my mind was blown on discovering how expensive aluminum is to mine and then to ship to opposite ends of the world to smelt and refine, and that we are using aluminum as soda cans. Now this fluorine, stuff we associate with toothpaste (fluoride), requires procedures of such cosmic scale to make, is just mind-blowing.
Translating Christ: Chinese and English discourses 