Like our bodies will always be here, our atoms, just in diff shape. We will become part of the soil,then grass then animals eat the grass . So our atoms will exist forever right? Our bones will last forever. Try to burn a newspaper you didnt get rid of it just changed its atoms that turned to smoke and floated up to outer space
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You can never get rid of energy. Matter is just one form that energy can take. Atoms and molecules are temporary arrangements of matter.
A small percentage of the carbon that makes up your bones is carbon-14. It is an unstable atom and will eventually change to Nitrogen, losing a tiny bit of mass in the process (this loss mass is changed into energy).
Maybe the atoms of the burnt newspaper are still around, but they are no longer molecules of paper. In the fire, most of it has gone up as CO2, undistinguishable from any other CO2 molecule.
Well…. mostly.
(At least, for any purposes for which we might possibly be concerned)
It is believed that the constituent particles of matter – down at the proton and neutron and electron level and even bow) may ‘decay’ over time – essentially becoming… energy…without ‘substance’. Or perhaps not even that.
But the last I recall reading about this – the estimated time frames were so vastly huge as to be… inconceivable.
The time considered would compare to the entire life-span of the universe thus far… about like the entire life-span of the universe compares to the time it takes for a single ‘flap’ of a hummingbird’s wings. (or about the time it takes the sound to get to your ear when you >snap< your fingers)
If the relatively newly-discovered ‘Dark Energy’ works in the way that some physicists have hypothesized, then the Universe may tear itself apart (the ‘Big Rip’) in just a few dozens to hundreds of billions of years. And then *everything* (down to the smallest components of atoms, etc) would tear itself apart (blowing up rather than decaying, you might say)
But either of these scenarios are so far beyond the scope of even *unreasonably expected span of humanities existence, that it isn’t something to be concerned with.
Correct you can never get rid of matter whether it turns into a different solid, liquid,gas or energy.