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ziq wrote (edited )

Energy doesn't cease to exist, whether we are alive or dead, we're still energy. Dying just means our energy is scattered back across the universe instead of being contained in a human body. We still exist, even if we're not conscious of it.

Physicist Aaron Freemen:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed.

You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.

And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.

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PainlessEphemera OP wrote

I never thought of it like that. I like it. Sounds a bit hippie-ish, but I’m a hippie type anyway so that doesn’t matter.

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NEOalquimista wrote (edited )

Perhaps having fun is the most appropriate purpose we can give to life. Anything else will raise the question:

why not cease to exist then? This would end all our problems.

But having fun needs no explanation. It's simply good and worth living for. We keep developing our understanding of the universe to find new ways to have fun. It's fun to be curious.

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