The Law of Conservation of Mass Does Not Prove An Afterlife
After thousands of years humanity cannot stop being curious about the makeup of everything that can be seen, heard, and touched. What is finite? What is infinite? The ultimate question is: why?
Aristotle and Democritus-- Ancient Beliefs
For the ancient philosopher Aristotle, all animals, plants, bodies, the Earth, the air, the water, and fire are brought together by nature and are distinct from things not made of nature. Whatever is not made of nature is not elucidated (to me) in his Book II on physics. A bed or garment has "no natural impulse for change," according to Aristotle, probably because something non-living such as a bed or garment makes no movements that are visible to the naked eye unless something else physically moves it. He referred to these things as "substance" that have a "substratum" wherein nature resides. It is in the nature of fire to move upward. "Nature is the proximate underlying matter of things that possess in themselves a principle of movement and change" [1].
Aristotle mentions the ancient Greeks' belief in the four fundamentals of matter (earth, air, water, and fire). He also posited a fifth element, the aether, as it seemed unlikely to him that the stars would comprise anything earthly. Those four elements described as the essences of everything seem more symbolic or hyperbolic if you look at it this way: solid (earth), liquid (water), gas (air), and plasma (fire). However, this does not describe our essences without defining matter. What is beneath matter? For something to be classified as matter, it must have mass, volume, and the atoms that are the minute invisible particles, without which the volume and mass cannot exist [2].
We derive the term "atom" from the Greek word atomos which means "indivisible," apparently originating in an ancient time before the microcosmic, mutable layers beneath the atoms were learned in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The ancient atomists, such as Democritus, believed that the physical world had two realities: 1) a reality of a boundless and unfathomable number of atoms with different shapes and sizes and 2) the "void," in which atoms jostled together in empty space; some clustered together on hooks and barbs while others repelled [3].
It is understandable why someone in Democritus's time of pre-microscopy would see the tiniest touchable material as indivisible. He was not around for Joseph John Thomson's discovery of electrons via cathode rays and Henri Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity and the atomic nucleus [4].
Two thousand years of believing in the Aristotelian way of earth, air, water, and fire would pass before humanity could develop the technology to view the world a little more like Democritus' view.
The Modern Understanding of Atoms
Not until the 1700s did chemists understand that elements and substances are things not chemically and ordinarily reducible down to simpler states. The combination of elements makes compounds with properties different from the predecessors [5].
Men in the 1790s focused more heavily on chemical reactions and measuring the masses of reacting elements and their compounds that methodically devised laws, one of which is called the law of conservation of mass, stating that the amount of mass present before the chemical reaction is not lost after the chemical reactions even though the substance has changed (reactants and products) [5]. You likely recognize this as "Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, but only rearranged."
Consider silver nitrate and sodium chloride (reactants) that solvate in water to generate silver chloride and sodium nitrate (products). 58.5 grams of sodium chloride with 169.9 grams of silver nitrate amounts to 228.4 grams of stuff. After the reaction and the separation of materials, we have 143.4 grams of silver chloride and 85.0 grams of sodium nitrate equal to a total mass of 228.4 grams of products [5]. Hence, the indestructibility and rearrangement of matter.
The Continuance of Atoms from Millions of Years Ago
I appreciate this January 2020 National Geographic article's explanation on the law of conservation of mass [6].
If ecosystems today are immutably and simultaneously undergoing chemical and physical changes as they were millions of years ago, and matter has been conserved in each one without exceptions, then all atoms, including the ones from dinosaurs and stars millions of years ago, have been recycled into humans and other lifeforms. No one can say from whom or what exactly you have inherited your human atoms. You could have gotten them from those dinosaurs and ancient stars [6]. But do not mistakenly think I am implying that you and I could have been a dinosaur, a star, plant, or other quadrupedal creature from many millennia ago, now reincarnated into humans.
The water we observe in nature today is a great example of the recycling of particles and stuff. Hydrogen and oxygen are naturally diatomic and must break their bonds to change their chemical properties to become water (2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O). A canyon stream did not just spontaneously appear from nothing. Many canyons get their water from snowy mountains after the water has already been cycled worldwide. Melting is the physical change of the stuff that joins the stream. Flowing through the canyon, the water may eventually become water vapor, leading back to the cycle's starting point but never vanishing from this world completely [6].
Matter is also not lost via photosynthesis. Plants store their chemical energy from the sun in their sugars. Their atoms, which are taken from the carbon dioxide in the air and water in the soil, have broken and reconstituted bonds to generate sugar and oxygen [6]. This is seen in the chemical equation for photosynthesis:
6CO2+6H2O + light → C6H12O6 (sugar) +6O2
The carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms are equal on both sides of the equation, demonstrating the law of mass conservation [6].
The animals that eat these plants energize their cells with the stored chemical energy transferred to them and grow and repair their bodies until they die and decompose, where those atoms are transferred into the ground. The atoms are not destroyed or created but instead transferred [6].
Carbon and Stardust
The transference and cycling of all this stuff recall something I have heard many times over the years: that humans emanated from stardust. Space.com published a 2017 article about a survey of 150,000 stars disclosing a makeup of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, of which we share 97% in common [7].
Before we accept this as evidence that we were something else in a past life, let's consider that the stardust idea's cognoscenti have been ardent skeptics against the supernatural and an afterlife [8]. Watch this YouTube Video.
Take Carl Sagan, for instance:
"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff" [9].
Then we have Neil deGrasse Tyson who said this:
"The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth. The atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems. Stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they're small and the Universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There's a level of connectivity. That's really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like you're a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you. That's precisely what we are, just by being alive…" [10]
Since carbon is such a pervasive element in the universe and is a constituent of carbon dioxide, the two get a lot of attention in many areas. As carbon dioxide is produced from burning materials, we breathe out carbon dioxide in such a way that connects us to the Earth's carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide is a compound with 32.0 grams of oxygen for every 12.0 grams of carbon. We can calculate the mass ratio of oxygen to carbon of 2.66 to 1 by dividing 32.0 by 12.0, demonstrating the law of multiple proportions. Carbon and oxygen can also unite as carbon monoxide (the gas that can latch onto hemoglobin and obstruct the binding of oxygen cells in the blood) with 16.0 grams of oxygen for every 12.0 grams of carbon. 1.33 to 1 is the mass ratio of oxygen to carbon here. Do not confuse carbon dioxide with carbon monoxide. The ratio exists in small whole numbers whenever more than one compound is formed from the same two elements and the different masses of one element unite with the same mass of the other element [11].
The law of conservation of mass helped us find the law of definite proportions, revealing that the elements are exactly proportional to the mass in all chemical compounds. Any pure water sample has a fixed composition with a mass of 11.19% hydrogen and 88.81% oxygen [12].
Even if your atoms are inherited from past organisms or humans, how could your nerve cells, glial cells, synapses, atoms, ions, and molecules all coalesce again to bring back the former 'you' and make new memory-making brain regions that remember your old memories in such a way that is consistent with the antiquated notion of reincarnation? And even if your atoms are continuing after death, how could they ever coalesce again to form your occipital lobe (in charge of observing and processing raw image data [16]) so that you can see your deceased relatives? How could they form your parietal lobe (in charge of visuospatial cognition, depth perception, navigation, movement, and adapting to physical surroundings [17]) so that you can interact with your deceased relatives in a way consistent with various doctrines on a paradisiacal afterlife? It appears to me that most of the doctrines on the afterlife, at least those promoted by the world's most preponderant faiths, assume that we can think, feel, speak, and act similar to how we can here, terrestrially. If that is the case, then we need all parts of our brain. We need every compound in our brain and nervous systems to replicate what we have here and make it better in a paradisiacal, pain-free way.
Our brain and heart are 73% water, a compound that includes hydrogen and oxygen [13], and is apparently changed and escaping your brain after death, considering how everything breaks down.
During decomposition, your complex organic components break down into simpler ones. Your body undergoes autolysis, which is basically self-digestion or destruction by its own endogenous enzymes. They digest the cell membranes and leak out during the disintegration of the cell. It starts in the liver, and eventually, the same happens to the brain. The skin is discolored by the damaged blood cells leaking out of broken vessels and settling in the capillaries [14].
Though you are dead, meaning you no longer live as you enthusiastically and desirously are now, the bacterial microbiome in your gut is still alive. But you surely would not want to say that you transform into your cadaveric ecosystem to defend the afterlife hypothesis. Do you [14]?
Surely, what kind of living thing are you in the afterlife without your many other internal organs absent of microbes here in this life? When your mortal body dies, so does your immune system to let microbes spread throughout the body where they were once absent, to digest the intestines, the surrounding tissues, the capillaries, lymph nodes, liver, and spleen before eventually devouring the heart and brain [14].
The liver mortis or lividity stage happens when you appear white and ghostly because of the stoppage of blood circulation and a heartbeat. As everything is stubbornly stiff in the rigor mortis stage 2-6 hours after death, what parts of you are moving around in the afterlife? Due to the loss of internal temperature control in the algor mortis stage, you will not have the comfortable feeling you imagine yourself having in the afterlife. Instead, your cadaver is adjusting to the ambient temperature that is still attached to this world. Gases are gathering in your cavities due to hydrogen sulfide to give you a greenish tint color. Your stratum corneum--or your outermost protective layer of skin that you find so beautiful--slips off. You will not have that like you assume to have it in the afterlife. The exposed cornea of your eye dries up and discolors itself in the tache noire stage. Again, as I asked before, how could you have vision to see your deceased relatives in the afterlife [15]?
Those pesky little bacterial and fungal mudlarks aid you in entering "nature's recycling process" after you finally putrefy. This is how forensic scientist, M. Lee Goff, describes it [15].
So, in some poetic, story-telling sense, we move on after this. We are conserved as the law states, but not in the same ways humanity had first imagined for thousands of years. What can we say about what there is to hear, see, or feel once these atoms pass on? As far as I can tell, there is nothing to show me that we can hear, see, or feel anything there.
Enjoy your atoms and your life as you have them now. Do not be anxious nor restless about what is to come after this.
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All information in this article is intended for educational/entertainment purposes only. This information should not be used as medical/therapeutic advice. Please seek a doctor/therapist for health advice.
Works cited:
[1] http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/zucchi/NuoviFile/Barnes%20%20-%20Physics.pdf
[4]https://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/EA/INDIVISIBLE.HTML
[7] https://www.space.com/35276-humans-made-of-stardust-galaxy-life-elements.html
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya2aIxU2fsY
[9] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/144310-the-nitrogen-in-our-dna-the-calcium-in-our-teeth
[14] https://mosaicscience.com/story/what-happens-after-you-die/
[15] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321792#What-happens-in-decomposition?
[16] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/occipital-lobe
[17] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/parietal-lobe#function
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