Scientifically speaking...am I immortal?

Question

You see...since all that I am is a pile of atoms, electrons etc...a million years from now, everything I am now will still exist in the universe.

When I rot in my grave and everything ends, am I still around? I just don't know it?

Answer 1

yep... and if man manages to survive, too, there will still be some of your genetic material around here somewhere, too!....

we are stardust......what we are made of came from the stars....so even when we are less than dust, we're still here...

Answer 2

the atoms of what you are made already existed 15 000 000 000 years ago.  That doesn't mean that yourself already existed since that time.

What makes a person is not the atoms themselves but how they are associated together to form a coherent organism.

The atoms of which you are made now were not for a big part of them, the same 10 years ago and won't be in 10 years.  

But you still the same person.

An analogy could be a country.  The US existed 200 years ago but none of its components (the inhabitants) were the same, and they won't be in the future. But the country itself can continue to exist (even if it changes) because what makes its identity is not its components but its structure and its continuity.

Answer 3

Scientifically speaking, atoms are immortal.  You are a meat machine, and when you die you are dead meat.

Answer 4

Ultimately all energy in the universe will run down to a state of zero free energy because of increasing entropy (see heat death).  Thereby the atomic particals composing you will break apart, and eventually will not retain enough energy to continue atomic motion.  From a relativistic point of view that could be considered the end of any substance that composed us in life.

Answer 5

Your atoms will probably last billions of years but you don't really have permanent atoms.  They are continuously replaced by proteins that you eat and lost as waste.  If you are immortal, then you are part dinosaur, plant and fish.  You will be returned to the earth and be recycled into all the new life but that actually happens before you die.  You are obviously more than the sum of your parts so I don't think you should consider yourself immortal.

Answer 6

Mortality refers to a lifeform, not to its constituent materials.  The word is derived from the Latin mortis, which means death.  A lifeform is mortal if it dies.  Immortality applied to humans can mean only (1) wishful thinking, (2) fiction, or (3) the immortality of the soul or spirit.  Science helps with none of those, though it is helping to extend the human lifespan.  But once you die, your earthly human life has ended.  It doesn't hang around in your atoms, it ends.

Answer 7

Yes, the atoms that make up your body will still be around but you will not.

Answer 8

Every day new atoms enter your body, and old ones get lost.

You are not a collection of particular atoms, but a process going on involving them.

When that process stops, you die.  The atoms will still be around, but that doesn't make you immortal, any more than all the other people that some of those atoms have passed through.