Carbon

If you heat a bit of sugar in a spoon over an open flame, it will transition from a white crystalline solid to a dark-brown liquid and eventually incinerate to produce a hard black material: carbon. Every living thing on earth, from us humans to all the other animals to all the plant life, is composed of carbon-based molecules. Carbon is similar to the extremely popular person you went to school with, the one who could make friends with almost anyone and with whom everyone wanted to be friends. Carbon’s unique ability to form “friendships” or bonds with other elements, and even itself, results in the creation of chains and rings of varying lengths, a property called concatenation.