(apologies if this is in the wrong place, I couldn't decide if it belongs in religion or science chat)

Putting aside for a moment the various religious speculations about an immortal soul, afterlife, etc. here is something I hope all can agree with: the matter that is your body will one day return to energy.
The question is: how do you want this process to happen to your matter/energy?

To quote Dr Neil DeGrasse Tyson "I would request that my body, in death, be buried not cremated so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the Earth so that flora and fauna can dine upon it just as I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life."

I find this very appealing! In a [very real] way this is life everlasting.
And yet cremation has its appeal too; it's like 'death in the fast lane'

One way or another we will all end up returning to energy.
How/where do you want to go?

I don't think it makes any difference really except whether your
family has a place to visit which is sometimes nice. There is no
real difference between matter and energy according to relativity.

True, it ultimately makes no difference, but I don't think you grasped the point of this topic.

I think there is confusion around the concept attributed to the word 'energy'.

Can you contrast different kinds of energy and then explain what kind of energy you expect will be returned to where, when a human dies?

Good question!
Firstly let me confess, I am merely a student and do not claim to fully understand the laws of conservation yet, but as I understand it: energy cannot be created or destroyed - the total energy of the universe is constant, mass=energy, etc.

So, the mass that is my [dead] body has a definite amount of potential energy stored within it. If it is buried in the Earth, eventually 'worms' (lol) will consume my mass, converting it into the energy they need to survive, and then they themselves will die (rinse and repeat), be consumed by another lifeform, passing on the energy they extracted from my mass to another, and so on. 'Worms' eat me, other animals eat the worms, other humans eat those animals. Energy gets passed on, life continues.

When a body is cremated, most of the energy contained in the body in the form of chemical bonds is released. It's not longer a source of energy for the metabolic processes of other flora and fauna, but it is a source of raw material (which is rearranged, for example by plants using the energy from the sun).

Theoretically, there is a lot more (non-chemical) energy in the ash which could be further liberated, but since most of our plants are not biological nuclear reactors, that energy will remained unused for a long, long time.

According to relativity, there is a very definite difference between matter and energy - just as there is a very definite difference between ice and water, and between red and green.

Pre-relativity, we over-estimated the difference between matter and energy. We were wrong. Matter and energy are far more closely related than we thought back then. This doesn't make them the same.

We have a much better understanding of the commonality of matter and energy, today... except the feel good hippie 'science writers' who continuously echo the nonsense that there is no real difference between the two.

Of course there is.

You cannot use matter, itself, to do work, without first converting it to energy. That makes matter and energy different - thought not as different as you may have once thought. If they were not different, there would be no need to convert it.


Anyone with a bit of physics background who thinks I'm wrong - please think a bit about what I actually said before responding.

Interesting, thank you
Would you say that being cremated is a more or less efficent (I mean, quicker or slower) process of matter to energy conversion?

Or maybe he's springboarding off in his own direction. We do that a lot on these boards, it makes it more interesting.

Compared to what? Being composted? And if you just mean quicker vs slower, cremation converts the chemical potential energy of the body into other forms of energy a lot quicker than rotting and being eaten by bugs, fungus, bacteria does.

There are dozens and dozens of other ways (at least) of framing the 'efficiency' question, so I wouldn't really say that its more efficient, in general; but I would agree that its quicker.

Yes, and this is part of why people say, wrongly, that mass and energy are the same. We once had energy conservation laws and mass conservation laws. Because these two different aspects of reality can be converted from one to the other, we now have a 'mass-energy' conservation law.





Sorry, I hadn't read this before making that post, above, which simply echos your post.

I anticipate a confused counter-argument, and want to clarify: a massive body can be used as part of the process of doing work - but it is the energy which is really doing the work. When I drive a nail into a board - the hammer has mass, and its a part of the process, but the hammer's mass isn't the source of the energy. You could say its the ATP in my muscle cells, or the food in my diet, or the sun that fed the plants I ate, whatever.

You can't take the mass of a motionless hammer and use the mass itself to do work (ie, without added energy), unless you first convert that mass into energy.

The mass of a nuclear bomb does a lot of work...and again must be converted into energy first.

This is perhaps the easiest way to see that mass and energy are different, though inter-convertible.

I like the Native American viewpoint that I see in the OP. I can see where being at the top of the food chain can be just as enjoyable as being at the bottom of the food chain. What beautiful karma.

I get that. I was refering to


this.

Are you asking if converting chemical energy to other forms of energy is more efficient (or quicker) than converting nuclear energy to other forms?

...running with the religious aspect (since you did decide to post it here) I would say that it both is and is not an everlasting life. In that however one disposes of remains the body persists in various ways through physiological and chemical conversions to energy and more matter in cycles that have no end, it is indeed everlasting. But with the loss of consciousness/will (which is what most people would think of as your soul, certainly the medium by which we experience being alive, and a key component to the definition of being alive(ability to react to external stimuli requires both awareness and will)) I'm not sure how it could be defined as an afterlife.

Since matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter
and they can be converted...well...I will agree at least that
they are different forms of the same thing.





I don't think the OP understood my answer either.

The question is do we want to be cremated or not and why?
Right?

My answer is I don't care and I don't think it really matters
because it all amounts to the same thing more or less.



If I had to choose one or the other today I would choose
burial. The reason I would choose this is because I have
seen families who wished to have a place to visit later
and regretted cremation. Also, I have participated in the
distribution of ashes and it does not always go smoothly.



Aaaaaachoo!



I also don't want to be vacuumed up later.

afterlife; unknowable.

To understand matter and energy, it is essential to understand both aspects of their relationship: (a) that they can be converted, from one to the other, and (b) that matter as matter and energy as energy are different.

There are people out there who really understand physics who don't get tripped up in the semantics, because they know that people in their discourse community know what they mean.

But as long as I keep running into new agers and such who read these books and actually think that matter and energy are 'the same', who think that there is no functional difference between matter as matter and energy as energy - well I think its important to avoid the phrase "matter and energy are the same" in public discourse.

You may have the underlying truth in mind as you say those words, but that doesn't guarantee your audience will.

Well I missed a good responce, made by Aperture, to my post but I sure am happy to see that Message was looking in and stepped in.

On a positive note to the OP, humans are constantly taking in matter and converting it to energy but where does does the energy go?

A person eats a meal, converts it into energy and pushes a plow and plants some seeds. (this is the short version) The seed prospers from the airation of the soil, the sun and the rain and it turns that matter into energy with which to grow and then humans consume what grew from the seed.

It's thought, by many, that energy simply contiues on, it cannot end.

So no matter what the form is, when we die the univers will find a way to turn what's left into energy.