What happens to our energy when we die?

Question

I've been told my whole life that "you can't destroy energy". If this is true then what happens to a persons energy when they die? Is it transfered somewhere else? What do ya think?

Answer 1

it basically poofs out of our body since theres no other energy pulsing around the blood vessels so yeah we dont have energy when we die :d everything just stops working

Answer 2

Life is not energy; life is the production, use and release of energy. You get your energy from the food you eat. You lose your energy through dissipation of your body heat. You lose it yourself, but it remains in the universe, as it cannot be destroyed, as you stated. You body heat warms up the air. The air warms other things. Those things and your body radiate energy in the infra red. That radiation eventually vents into space.

When you die, you stop turning food into energy. No energy flow, no life.

Answer 3

Any left over heat in the human body is slowly transferred to the environment(which is used by forensics in determining time of death). Any undigested food remains undigested and remains in the form of caloric batteries it was in before being consumed.

The human body is an engine which transforms other forms of energy into "body energy"(food, sunlight, water, etc). The human body by-itself doesn't generate any mysterious energy.

Answer 4

energy is always transferred..but with dead bodies idk where it would be transferred to. Law of conservation of energy says energy can never be created or destroyed. we are learning about it in science now lol

Answer 5

your energy is used up??? when you eat meat, that meat ate a plant most likely, and that plant got energy from the sun.  when you die, your energy has been used up??? or maybe decomposers eat it???

Answer 6

We use it in the next life, not life as this is, spirit world,

Answer 7

People don't have "energy," not the way the word is used in physics. Matter, of which we are composed, has energy, which is the force of movement or potential for creating movement and effects upon other matter. When we die we cease to be living organisms, but the matter of which we are composed retains its potential to interact with other matter and transmit or be turned into energy (for example, you can burn a corpse). While we are alive, a constanct series of chemical, electrical and physical interactions provides the energy which endows us with the ability to move, interact with others and even to perform the processes which we call thinking. The energy expended in these actions, like all energy, is transformed by the actions themselves into other forms of energy. Death is the word used to describe when certain types of such transformations within our organism are no longer possible as the potential for that type of activity ceases, and we are no longer describable as living. The concept "soul" in our religious and philisophical traditions came about as a result of speculation in the absence of adequate understanding of the bodily processes we call life. "What is life," is really the root question you are asking. Remember that we humans invented our own languages, and just because we coined the word life doesn't mean that it is an exact description of the reality of how existence on our 3 dimensional plane really works for the matter (organisms) we consider to be living. It may be just as valid to think of Earth as the living organism and each of us just a particle of the living earth with inconsequential individual identities. No matter what you think is true, you are alive now and someday you will be dead. Make the most of your life and be happy to be alive. It can be a **** of a great ride if you don't waste it.

Answer 8

It's transferred out of your body. I saw two people die. It looks like their body lifted up and came down.

It's like the soul pulled out of their bodies. It's an emotional enigma that's hard to explain. Where the soul goes is a mystery.

Answer 9

recarnation?

Answer 10

The energy that a person posesses is composed of chemical energy.  People must consume chemical energy in the form of food Calories every day in order to stay alive and maintain health.  That energy is expended every day in order to maintain your body temperature, heart rate, metabolism, brain function, etc.,

When you die, you stop consuming and expending energy.  The energy that was stored in your body in the form of biomass (bones, muscle, fat, organ tissue, etc.,) is broken down and consumed by bacteria or is burned off if you are cremated.

Answer 11

Remember when little kid gets fussy about food, they are told "you need to eat to have energy in your body". The body consumes the energy and converts into different forms for survival. When it works hard like when running high temperature, the body works harder, generating more energy, thus the body getting hot. So, the conversion process stops with death, what happens after that depends on your religious philosopy, the final rites depends on the family/friends left behind..

Answer 12

That's an interesting point because we've discovered that for all the matter in the universe there's also anti matter and when a star dies it becomes a black hole so it's now the opposite of what it used to be because it once gave out energy and now it takes it so I'm not sure what's going to happen to our energy.

Answer 13

You've gotten some very good answers here, all based upon classical physics. However, there is an element of quantum physics involved.  The laws of quantum physics are not in any way constrained by those for classical physics.

Given that, what happens to our "change" in energy when we die?  Well, just like the universe itself, we start off in a high-energy low entropy state, the fertilized egg.  As we mature into childhood and eventually into adulthood, our energies decrease and our entropy (measure of system order or disorder) increases. This can be delayed somewhat by taking in high-energy / low-entropy foods. By the time we reach our natural state of death, energy approaches a condition of rest or zero state, entropy is in a state of equilibrium where the degree of order equals the degree of disorder and no further change can occur.  At this point, no further energy (lower entropy) is taken into the system (e.g., low entropy foods), and the final energy states are simply disipated in various forms such as heat lost, biological and biochemical breakdown, etc.  The system is considered dead and its "energy" is then converted to other forms.

However, this may not be the complete story.  As I said, as with all matter in the universe, there are matter / antimatter associations and particle dualities, as well as quantum wave function associations that do not necessarily follow the laws of classical physics.

I am not suggesting that there is anything like a soul associated with biological life, but there exists quantum wave function information that is directly associated with the physical classical reality.  Something does happen on a quantum level, I feel, when matter (energy) changes states.  Now, what that may be cannot currently be determined, but may one day become known.

Life is the universe's way of become aware of itself, in my opinion.