Answer: Not so much dust; mostly water.
The question: What is man made of?
Or “ugly bags of mostly water”, according to one of those sticks in your mind phrases from a TV show –
“Home Soil” 1st season episode #18 of Star Trek: The Next Generation
(Wikipedia plot summary)
["Home Soil" How's that for an intriguing episode name?]
Overview: The crew of the Enterprise discovers a crystalline life-form with murderous intelligence.
…
…
[the life-form represented by] … a cluster of several points of light. Data works with the computer on the analysis. The computer relays its composition: silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide, cadmium selenide, water, sodium crystals…forming a natural superconductor array. Elsewhere, an engineer reports that the power fluctuations are increasing, causing numerous systems around the ship to go haywire; something is taking over. Soon, the universal translator comes online by itself, “Ugly bags of mostly water!” Picard is confused, and Data indicates it is an accurate description of human physiology; he points out that humans are 90% water surrounded by a flexible container. (This is actually incorrect; humans are about 60% water with variation by gender and body type. Also, bones and tissue are found throughout the body and do not form a flexible container with water inside) …
Another site follows up on the Ugly Bags of Mostly Water theme with a scientific review of The Chemical Composition of Human Biology
What’s our chemistry? Everybody knows that we are mostly made of H2O: about 65% of our substance, actually. The crew of the starship Enterprise, under the command of Captain Jean Luc Picard, was once creatively insulted by a dry, crystalline life form: the humans were slandered as “ugly bags of mostly water.” The wee crystal beasties certainly pegged us chemically! …
…
Suppose you wanted to make a person from raw elements. What would be on your shopping list?If you had a ray gun that could reduce a human being to elements, you’d have a whole lot of hydrogen and oxygen from all the water — approximately ten gallons worth — plus a bunch of carbon and nitrogen. You could just barely make a brick out of the remaining couple dozen elements. … [ingredient chart in article] …
Huh?
I thought we was dust.
Even like the 1977 hit single by Kansas: “Dust in the Wind”
OR
as in Genesis 2:7: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
Where did the moisture come from?
I thought about titling this entry: “Did God Slobber?”
Maybe the shaping of “man” was so hilarious that God spewed his drink with the “breath of life”.
And what is this “breath of life”? Is it exhalation or inhalation? Does the original Hebrew express the relative humidity of God-breath? Did He inhale some primordial ooze and then exhale into the man-dirt pile?
When I think of “dust” I envision something seriously desiccated. OK. I checked the interlinear. The proper translation appears to be “soil”. That is the limit of my linguistic scholarship skills. If someone of more advanced academics wants to opine, knock yourself out. I guess “dust” just sounds more poetic to translators.
Maybe there is some scientific verification for composition comparisons. I vaguely recall some anecdotal mention, in some lecture or sermon, that common dirt had all the basic elements and proportions for a human body. Well, scratch my head and ask: “Are all dirts alike in ph and compound and microbial portions?”
Yes microbes. A stat that I find interesting is –
The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that number of microbial cells. …
I had previously read from “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson — on Page 303:
“… They just seem to like to be with you. Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria’s point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them. …”
[The 10:1 ratio is same for both sources but quantity discrepancy of "quadrillion" as opposed to "trillion" is a puzzlement.]
Following the embed link to the article on bacterial cell count, I found an answer to a question I have held about the spatial occupation comparison related to the count ratio:
All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells, according to Carolyn Bohach, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho (U.I.), along with other estimates from scientific studies. (Despite their vast numbers, bacteria don’t take up that much space because bacteria are far smaller than human cells.) Although that sounds pretty gross, it’s actually a very good thing. [emphasis added]
In our symbiotic affinity with dust, we are essentially a host to, or in part, a colony of microbes; I am a cellular co-op. So did God gather from primordial ooze or strictly use divine mud?
A Living Soul: Not So Much Dust; Mostly Water.
An ugly bag of mostly water? Maybe.
Ugly being in the eye of beholder.
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