Energy: your passport to the afterlife?
I read a while back that because your body contains energy and because energy cannot be destroyed, when you die it is your body’s residual energy supply (‘life force’ or ‘psychic’) that becomes the ‘ you’ in the realm of the afterlife. Sorry, I’m afraid not. It’s an interesting idea but without any final merit.
It is very clear that when you die, your physical body does not go anywhere; no to the Hell of La-La-Land; no to Heaven from Neverland. They will most likely bury it, cremate it, or hand it over to medical students to look at and dissect. What about that other ‘half’ of you, your energy? Where is he going, if indeed he is going?
An Energetic Beyond: The living body is full of energy. What happens to all that energy when the living body becomes the non-living body? Energy, after all, cannot be created or destroyed; it just changed shape. Can you take your energy with you to the afterlife? in fact, is it the energy of your body that becomes ‘you’ in the afterlife? Oh no. Let’s examine the various forms of energy, see which forms apply to the living body, and what happens to those relevant forms of energy when you start pushing those daisies. I’ll start with the non-beginners, for beginners.
Kinetic/Potential Energy: Kinetic energy is energy of motion, but after you die, you don’t move, so your kinetic energy is zero. Your potential energy is also zero unless an external force prompts you to move and you (well, your body) gain kinetic energy, but you have no control over that movement. If you just lie forever on the slab (or in the grave), your potential energy is zero for all practical purposes.
Gravitational Energy: Your living body has mass, therefore it has gravity. Your dead body has mass, therefore gravity. Gravity stays when you die; you don’t take gravity with you into the great unknown, or rather, gravity doesn’t take you into the great unknown.
Nuclear Power: Nuclear power comes in two forms. First, there is nuclear fusion which does not occur inside of you unless you are a Sun God (or the Sun) or an H-bomb. Second, there is nuclear fission which comes in two forms, fast and slow. Rapid nuclear fission is similar to the explosion of an atomic bomb. Slow nuclear fission is radioactivity. You are slightly radioactive since some of the carbon you ingest is radioactive, not to mention the radioactive stuff from nuclear fallout and the natural environment that enters your system. But once you die, your intake ceases and that radioactive energy just fades away and decays in the fullness of time until it becomes nothing, or at least non-radioactive substances. All those alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays just go back into the environment.
Sound Energy: Sound energy is evident when sonic booms rattle windows and opera singers smash wine glasses. Unfortunately, while you may have been the biggest loudmouth on the block while you were alive, when you’re dead, you can hear a pin drop!
Solar Power – Ultimately the product of nuclear fusion, you can lie out in the sun and get a nice tan and your share of vitamin D, but sitting in the sun will not increase your athletic abilities or in any way contribute to increasing your energy supply from his body. Energy. If that’s what you want, eat sugar.
Thermal/Geothermal/Heat Energy: Sitting in a Jacuzzi; Soaking in a hot spring can make you feel good, but such activities do nothing to boost your energy levels. Again, if you want more energy stores (body fat), eat lots of sugar.
Wind and wave energy: You can pass wind and make waves, but these forms of what is ultimately transformed solar energy contribute nothing to your energy share and are irrelevant from anyone else’s point of view life you aspire to.
And now let’s move on to forms of more energetic relevance.
Body heat: On average, your body is warmer than the surrounding environment, so when you die, this infrared (IR) heat energy according to the second law of thermodynamics cools and equilibrates with the surrounding temperature that surrounds it. His IR energy is only used to heat the surroundings until his body and surroundings are the same temperature. Your corpse, while you still have a body, will contain heat energy since your corpse has a temperature. But since that temperature is the same temperature as room temperature, that energy is useless to perform any real useful function. In addition, that thermal energy stays with the corpse. Now what would be awesome is that when you die, your body temperature immediately drops well, far, far below ambient temperature, as if your entire body energy package had been packed up and moved somewhere else. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to happen. In fact, to be honest, it doesn’t completely happen.
Chemical/Electrical Energy: You have a lot of chemical energy within you, all kinds of chemistry is going on within you and some of that chemical energy is converted into electrical energy. What happens to that electrical energy when you die? Well, what happens to the electrical power in a wire going to the light bulb when you flip the switch? The same difference. In fact, that’s one definition of death: no electrical power is present.
Body Chemistry: What’s with all that chemistry inside of you? Well, when you die, your body chemistry is reversed. Entropy recovers its natural order and increases. Your disorder increases. Your body chemistry breaks down and breaks down to less complex chemistry (giving off odors in the process), but that breakdown is caused by other organisms, usually microbes. The microbes decrease their clutter by increasing yours. You no longer eat; now you’re the one eaten. Its chemical/electrical energy is converted to its chemical/electrical energy. You don’t carry it with you; you don’t share it; you give it all Your loss is the gain of others. When the last bits of you are consumed, fossilized, weathered, and eroded to dust and, below, individual atoms scattered to the four corners of the globe, then there is no way, no way to speak of your energy: it is gone; not destroyed, just gone.
Frozen Body Chemistry: What happens if your body is put on dry ice or liquid nitrogen etc. where germs can’t get to you? Well, your entropy (disorder) may not increase, but it also doesn’t decrease (your whole life is one long battle keeping disorder at bay). In short, once you’re dead, there’s no way to lessen the clutter; the best you can hope for is a stalemate. But again, the temperature of your dead body is the same as its surroundings, so nothing useful can be accomplished; there is no net energy flow from A to B or from B to A. What about just putting it in a sterile environment at body temperature or at least room temperature? Unfortunately, that won’t work as your dead body will be eaten from the inside out by the billions of hungry microbes already living inside of you. If you are stiff and frozen, then the microbes inside you are also frozen and cannot bite you.
In conclusion, all the energy that is an integral part of you and that is in you at this moment as a living being will be disbursed in the larger environment once you kick the bucket. You cannot have an energetic afterlife based on your energy reserves at the time of death. There is simply no association between your energy and an energetic afterlife. I’m sorry about that!