What Happens To Your Energy After you Die. During the time that you will be watching this video, 500 people around the world will die. Their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams no longer with us.
About 3 people die every 2 seconds. I hope you will not be one of them. But if are, you may take some comfort knowing that your energy will live on. It will not ever be destroyed. Does this mean that the energy of your spirit or consciousness will also live on?
Your energy after you die will in fact be HIGHER than it is while you are alive. How is that possible? The energy and matter in the universe does not change. It merely changes form. This is the first law of thermodynamics. Energy and matter do not get destroyed.
To understand why your body after death has more energy than when it was alive, you have to understand where all the energy in your body is. The vast majority of your energy is in the form of chemical energy stored in the fats, proteins and carbohydrates that you carry around in your tissues and fluids.
About 20% of your body weight is in the form of fats, and another 15% is in the form of proteins. About 2% is in the form of carbohydrates. All these are forms of chemical potential energy. When you are alive, and you are moving around. Your body is continually converting the chemical energy that you carry around in your body, in the form of carbohydrates like glucose into heat and kinetic energy which is used to move your your muscles like your heart, your arms, legs, intestines. These movements are eventually converted to heat.
The formula looks like this.
C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O + 38 ATP + Heat
Glucose + oxygen = water + carbon dioxide + energy
ATP or Adenine Triphosphate is what your muscles use to contract and move.
And all this energy that you are constantly expending is eventually turned into carbon dioxide, water, and heat. If you looked at your living body through a heat camera, you would see a whole bunch of heat coming off of you. Whenever we create energy for our muscles or nerves, we lose an equal amount of chemical energy.
Trees and plants convert light energy of the sun to chemical energy in the form of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Animals convert these same carbohydrates, proteins and fats into kinetic, electrical and heat energy.
Light+Carbon Dioxide+water = Oxygen+GlucoseLight+6CO2 +6H2O 6O2+C6H12O6
So What happens when you drop dead. You are no longer converting your stored chemical energy into other forms of energy. You stop losing the chemical stores in your body. But when you are alive, you are losing your stores of energy constantly. So just like a car parked in the garage has more fuel than the same car running on the highway, you have more energy when dead than alive.
Now let’s answer the metaphysical question about whether any of your energy is retained as conscious or spiritual energy. Every kind of energy, whether electrical, kinetic, sound, even nuclear, all of the chemical and electrical potential in the body is eventually converted to heat energy. This is true even after you die. Your chemical energy and your electrical energy will all eventually be converted to heat. This has to do with Newtons 2nd law. Entropy or disorderliness of the universe always increases.
But energy is absolutely conserved upon death by conversion to other forms of energy. Unfortunately, conversion to spiritual or conscious energy doesn’t appear to be one of them. There is no evidence that your consciousness is conserved in any way. The electrical energy of your brain simply ceases to be, and will change form to a higher entropy, or more disordered form of energy, namely heat.
There have been many, attempts to measure a drop in energy or mass leaving the body at the “moment of death” to prove that a spirit has left the body. But these experiments have been not been repeatable, and not well controlled.
The most famous is the 1907 experiment by Dr. Duncan MacDougall where he put his patients dying of tuberculosis on giant scales. He claimed that these patients, upon death lost an average of 21 grams – which became popularly considered the weight of our souls. He had 6 patients and so 6 data points, and it was not repeated.
All current evidence indicates that nothing spectacular, spiritual, or inspiring appears to suddenly leave or enter the body upon death.
Heat does leave your body, and the chemical store of your body do get consumed by bacteria and other organisms, and eventually turned into heat. But this heat is not your spirit or consciousness – it is just the most disordered form of energy.
The body, perhaps not unlike the universe at the end of time, will simply die a very slow heat death. And we humans can some take comfort that every single atom and every nano watt of energy that we are carrying around right now will live on until the end of time.
