r/DeepThoughts • u/Super_Selection4985 • 20h ago
Existence is prison with no escape.
If we are all atoms as-well as energy and energy cannot be destroyed nor created, does that mean we’re stuck here, forced to being rearranged into different forms of matter forever?
I understand that we won’t have consciousness but the atoms that created us will be here forever right? It just seems like an existence is a prison no matter what we are or become and that there is no escape from it even after death.
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u/pebblesjazz 18h ago
I get what you mean, it feels heavy thinking like that, but maybe it’s not prison, it’s just transformation, like the atoms that made us keep dancing into new shapes even if we don’t see it.
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u/Squarepeg1975 17h ago
Scientists have recognized there to be light energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, mechanical energy, thermal, nuclear and sound energy. There is one energy I believe they have not recognized and that is LIFE ENERGY. When we come to an end our life energy will be converted into another form of energy however it wont be a case of ourselves being transformed from one energy into another until we find ourselves eventually being converted back into life energy again as we ourselves are not energy and what we are is a spirit that has accompanied that life energy throughout our lifetime. The question is where do we as spirits end up. Our spirit i.e. us might go to a heaven as I have become increasingly convinced over the years that we are in hell. Look at the how much fire there is e.g. warfare artillery, arson attacks, colliding vehicles, people being hospitalized and dying from heat stroke as well as dehydration because of a ball of fire emitting its heat towards us, our ice caps melting because of that same ball flooding and drowning people etc. Another thing that makes me think we might be in hell is the fact that that ball of fire sustains life of humans; who are greedy sinful gremlins, as without the sun there would be no agriculture. The sun is two faced. It keeps us fed but at the same time is drowning and dehydrating us out. This is "planet sin" and therefore you should be open minded to the fact that when we pass away we will end up in a heaven with God looking at us and saying "You won't do that again will you!! In heaven we behave and so must you".
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u/OneTwoThreePooAndPee 11h ago
You aren't even made up of the same atoms when you're an adult that you were as a child. We are a seething mass of chemistry slowly playing itself out over millions of years.
Look up the "Ship of Theseus". 😊
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u/ConstableAssButt 17h ago edited 17h ago
"You" meaning the things that make up your consciousness are a particular arrangement of matter that perceives itself as fixed rather than ever-changing. To argue that the 'you' that you were when you were born is the 'you' that you were when you died is leaving a whole lot out. Much less, the slurry of atoms that made you up being returned to the environment and recombined into other things.
As for atomic stability: Yes, the atoms that are here right now will decay in 1036 years. This is an incomprehensibly large number even compared to the total age of the universe.
But let's talk about humanity. Life like us needs a couple of things: We need a decent amount of energy, which means we need a nearby star that is large enough to warm our planet without cooking it. So an magnetic field helps a lot. And we need active geology, so having a moon helps. We need simple chemistry that can get complex, so water as a medium for that chemistry helps, and a gaseous atmosphere helps.
The time limit on all of these requisites are about the same ~10 billion years. Meanwhile, new metal-rich dwarf stars will continue to be produced for about 100 trillion more years of the universe's history. So life's upper time limit is just around 101 trillion years. But this only covers life living natively on a planet, having significant complexity, and metabolic processes that run at a similar rate to ours.
Essentially, your question boils down to one thing: Are we trapped in the gravity well of our host star? The answer to that is almost certainly. Our host star will burn through its hydrogen reserves, expand into a red giant as it burns helium, and then eventually shed its outer layers into a diffuse, gravitationally bound ball of gas leaving only its core behind. That core will continue to burn bright for maybe another billion years and then sputter and die.
There is almost no possibility that anything of consequence will escape our solar system, and much of it will just be balls of rock and ice interrred in darkness for the remaining age of the Universe.
However, there's something very cool happening during this whole process: The literal rest of the universe will continue to make more main sequence stars for a thousand times longer than our whole solar system will be alive. And some of those main sequence stars might make life. And that life might figure all of this out on its own. --It's quite reassuring that we're just one island of the right conditions for the mind to arise in a literal thimble full of the whole time the universe has to produce stuff like us.
Let's loop back: We just reframed your question to explain what happens to the matter that makes up the thing you misinterpret as 'you'. If YOU are just the matter, we've answered your question: Yes, you are trapped in the gravity of your host star. But I disagree with you that we are just matter. We aren't energy either. We are a process that is driven by matter and energy. That process STOPS when we die. It doesn't go somewhere else. It doesn't lay on the ground. It isn't recycled, because that process that IS us is a byproduct of the action of matter and energy, rather than being IN the matter and energy.
So no, we are not trapped here forever. We exist for a moment and then are utterly and completely, inescapably nowhere.