Our body consists of old stuff...

Sadow

Yep, the topic tells you what we are made of... old stuff, meaning atoms, elements of this earth, as old as the earth itself. I'm curious how other people feel about it.
Let me guide you through this cycle of life. An old man/woman dies and gets buried on a cemetary. The body returns to the earth and it turns to dust again: hydrogen, carbon, oxygen... whatever our body contains will be released after the flesh is digested by all kinds of natural processes. Grass feeds itself on top of these grounds and it grows. Suddenly a cow appears on the cemetary and it eats the grass. The grass is made of atoms it took from what's in the ground, which came from the body of the deceased woman/man. The grass is being digested and all nutricious elements of the grass is used by the body of the cow to create new cells. Tissue is being formed by the cells and the young cow grows into a magnificent animal. Suddenly the cow is hunted by other men and it gets killed. Flesh is taken from the cow and gets eaten by men. So these people actually consume atoms which were once in the body (maybe in the eye or tongue or genetals) of the man/woman we started with.

This cycle goes on and on, and it's very possible that you have atoms in your body which were once in the body of a Tyrannosaurus Rex or whatever creature that lived thousands of years ago.
Nice thought? or maybe not so nice? give me your opinion please.

KronikSindrome

that makes me feel special Very Happy

when Wiliam Shatner Dies I'm going to sneak in and eat some of his ashes......

that way maybe I can retain some of his awesomeness Twisted Evil

Gagnar The Unruly

As Carl Sagan used to say, we are all made of stardust. It also lends extra credence to the statement that we are what we eat.

In reality, some of the atoms in our body come and go pretty frequently. We are a pretty open system. I like to think of humans as being like standing waves -- the actual material of our existance is drifting around and moving in and out of us, but the pattern that defines our existence is fairly stable. When we change, it's the material stuff that makes us up that changes, as much as the pattern defining us that changes.

That said, some of our molecules are more stable than others. Atoms making up our proteins, DNA, and micromolecules are probably turning over pretty quickly, because all those molecules have fairly short half-lives. Similarly, anything having an ionic interaction with water isn't going to stay in one place long. But things like fat molecules in our adipose tissue may remain unchanged for a long time. A fat molecule isn't just going to randomly exchange its 5' carbon the way a nucleic acid is going to trade around its acidic proton.

ocalhoun

Sadow

Hmmm, yes, I should have said "atleast as old as the earth itself" Razz

dirkvb

But you have to know nothing in your body is made before 11 years ago.
Maybe your body exist of ancient part of atoms but your body makes always new part, nothing is older then 11 years.