09/04/2026
What's the legacy the earth is going to take when you transition?
There is a beautiful scientific truth behind this idea: the material making up your body doesn’t disappear when life ends. It simply begins moving through Earth’s natural cycles again.
The “70%” figure is a little high for most adults. The human body averages closer to 60% water, although the percentage varies considerably with age and body composition. That water is found throughout us, from blood and muscles to organs and individual cells.
Eventually, those water molecules can return to the environment. Water continuously moves between soil, groundwater, rivers, oceans, living organisms and the atmosphere through evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff and infiltration.
So a molecule of water that was once inside a human body could eventually enter groundwater, flow into a river, evaporate into the atmosphere and fall somewhere else as rain. It could later become part of a plant, an animal or another person. There is no predetermined destination, but the recycling itself is very real.
The same principle applies to the rest of our matter. Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements continually move through ecosystems. Microorganisms break down organic material, returning its chemical building blocks to soil, air and water, where living organisms can use them again.
In that physical sense, nature wastes remarkably little. The particular arrangement of atoms that makes each of us is temporary, but the atoms themselves continue their journey through Earth long after we are gone.
Source: U.S. Geological Survey, National Academies of Sciences.
