Michael Dembinski
Jul 23, 2017 · 1 min read

Every atom of which you are made will survive your body by billions of years. Those electrons have already been whizzing around the nucleus for billions of years. The carbon of which is such a significant part of you is literally stardust — it was formed in the heart of stars. The hydrogen in you — the most numerous of the atoms that form you — has existed since 379,000 years after Big Bang (13.8 billion years ago) and will go on existing for a long, long time to come.

Atoms combine to form molecules, some bonds are stronger, some weaker. Think of the amazing coincidence required for all the seven billion billion billion atoms (99% of which are hydrogen, oxygen and carbon) to come together to form YOU.

But you have at best several score years of life ahead of you.

Then what?

What happens to your awareness, your consciousness, your memories once the mechanisms that sustain your brain, cease to function?

Science is only beginning to understand the inner workings of the atom’s nucleus — all those quarks, bosons, mesons, gluons, neutrinos — what’s all that about? Why do they exist, and what’s their function?

Could it be that the everlasting atoms that make up your body — be they buried or cremated — have been left the impression that they were once in you?

    Michael Dembinski

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