Life after death

March 30, 2005 8:13 AM

Where am I physically going to be in 2 million years. Say I am hypothetically buried in a suburb of Boston, MA tomorrow....where am I physically going to end up? Dissolved into the ocean? A couple hundred feet down in dirt? Some of my ashes might be part of the construction of another animal? Where will I be in 10 million years too. Guesses and educated guesses welcome.
posted by pwally to human relations (17 comments total)

in about 5 billion years, if that's any help, the sun will expand in its red giant phase and you'll end up scattered through nearby space as a planetary nebula.
posted by andrew cooke at 8:26 AM on March 30, 2005

Okay maybe I picked a number that was way too low, I guess if you could not think 2 million or 10 million but till the end of time and space. I think that should cover it.
posted by pwally at 8:29 AM on March 30, 2005

I guess early on it really depends on how you're disposed of, but eventually you'll just be dirt. Sooner or later you'll probably end up as nutrients for something, most likely some kind of plant. This plant in turn will be eaten by something else, which will either be eaten by something else or die and become soil nutrients, etc. etc.

THE CIIIIIIRCLE OF LIIIIIFE
posted by borkingchikapa at 8:33 AM on March 30, 2005

Two words: soylent green

Well, before we get eaten up by that red giant, and assuming you just become dirt, and part of the earth, here's a site that shows a prediction of the movement of plate tectonics over the next 200 million years. Looks like Boston will be in the tropic of cancer. More crabs!
posted by furtive at 8:41 AM on March 30, 2005

Your body will dissolve into ashes, eventually providing nutrients to the soil. An animal of some sort (non-existant today) will be eating a piece of fruit right above you, and leave a seed or two, which the soil will eventually take in. A plant will develop, with the help of trace nutrients from your body, and may develop into a tree. Fruits from your tree may fall onto the ground to be gathered by other animals, and they too will leave seeds scattered around the area, which too may plant and develop into trees (with microscopic traces of nutrients you provided.) Eventually a whole forest of trees with your nutrients developed, some of which has to be torn down in order to build a hyperspeed expressway through. A drunken politican (perhaps a direct descendant of the Kennedy family) will crash into one of your trees, and whatever nation we may be at that time will be in mourning for several days, until his clone fully matures and takes over his role. Eventually, the cloned politican becomes President, and immediately declares the forest a hazard and orders it to be paved to put up a parking lot.

Several shoppers at the AOL/Turner/MCI/Cisco-Walmart Supercenter report hearing ghostly sounds in the parking lot late at night.
posted by icontemplate at 8:51 AM on March 30, 2005

2 million years? Depends. Do you plan to be buried? Metal vault or concrete? Cremated?
posted by mischief at 8:56 AM on March 30, 2005

This touches on a related question: If I wanted to become a fossil, how could I best ensure that that happens to my body?
From my own brief foray into the topic, it looks like it is staggering difficult to become a fossil - it only happens in exactly the right conditions, which are pretty hard to find. And if you don't fossilize, I guess you become one with the dirt, gasses, plants, animals etc. of the future.

There's some Cleopatra in all of us :)
posted by -harlequin- at 9:00 AM on March 30, 2005

The individual atoms that constituted you at the time of death? I think that's what we have to look at, because even the molecules will have been broken down, the atoms incorporated into new molecules, and those molecules broken down thousands of times over. And I say "at the time of death," because many many atoms which were once part of you are already no longer part of you.

Having said that, something like 90% of your body is water, and even hydrogen and oxygen atoms in your body that are not currently in water molecules are likely to end up as water. That'll mostly end up in the water cycle--lakes, oceans, rivers, atmospheric water vapor, rain, snow, or frozen into glaciers or permafrost. Probably all of the above at one time or another over the course of a few million years.

Other elements (along with a tiny fraction of the hydrogen and oxygen) will likely end up in other living things, as borkingchikapa noted. Some fraction of the carbon from your body will be carbon dioxide at any given time, either in the atmosphere or dissolved in the oceans. There are other possible outcomes for these elements as well, though probably less likely: trapped in fossil fuel deposits, incorporated into rocks.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:03 AM on March 30, 2005

Read Primo Levi's exellent chapter on Carbon from The Periodic Table. The link tells the story of what happens to a single carbon atom over hundreds of millions of years.
posted by driveler at 9:04 AM on March 30, 2005

Short version of my answer above: spread out all over the earth, including land, sea, and sky.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:05 AM on March 30, 2005

I forget the exact numbers but something like 98% of the molecules in your body turnover every 5-7 years.
posted by euphorb at 9:17 AM on March 30, 2005

This touches on a related question: If I wanted to become a fossil, how could I best ensure that that happens to my body?

How to get fossilized.
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:31 AM on March 30, 2005

I forget the exact numbers but something like 98% of the molecules in your body turnover every 5-7 years.

anyone got a reference? i'm a bit sceptical, but if true i want to know....
posted by andrew cooke at 9:53 AM on March 30, 2005

Embalming will probably have its own effect.
posted by mischief at 2:19 PM on March 30, 2005

It's thought that each of us has about 1 billion of Shakespeare's atoms. As in, a billion of the atoms that make up your body (which ain't very much compared with the whole) used to belong to Shakespeare.

Now release the carb and breathe in deep this time...
posted by zardoz at 5:41 PM on March 30, 2005

You'll be underwater, frozen, with some nuclear waste on top of you. There will be stridoforous hybrids prancing around on the land over you, that should make you happy because they are peaceful creatures. Furthermore, humans will be 'unearthing' anyone they can in hopes dynamically reviving them, so you might be around again soon.
posted by sled at 6:43 PM on March 30, 2005

If you go the fossil route then over a timescale in the 10s - 100s of millions of years you'll be subject to geological processes. You'll be converted into rock, then you might have your lithified bones thrust into the air as part of a mountain range. Then you'll be eroded and will probably wind up on the ocean floor (it's where sediment goes to).

Once on the ocean floor you'll inexorably follow the fate of the oceanic plate, and over a hundred million years you'll get thrust into a subduction zone. Once you get down there you could well wind up working your way into the middle of the earth (the mantle) or maybe getting involved in being part of a volcano.

Ultimately your fate will be entwined with that of the Earth and then the Universe.

YMMV.
posted by grahamspankee at 9:45 AM on March 31, 2005