Boiling hot, sun drenched day in 1973, sunlight strikes a tree. Fast forward 20 years and those same, bell-bottom-wearing photons are released from a piece of that tree in your fireplace.
Nothing quite like wood, we can release stored energy that we didn’t even have to pay to store, like no solar panel anywhere. We can build things with it, live in it, make handles for the things that we use, read off of it and in the final analysis, still release the photon stored for hundreds if not thousands of years. Consider burning an ancient Egyptian wooden spoon. Energy that was stored from the sun 3,000 years ago!
Have you considered that the gasoline in your fuel tank is certainly millions and millions of years old. It represents the refined decomposition-products of ancient plants send animals.
Take it a step further: The metal in the car you’re driving is as old as the planet itself.
And while you certainly are a brand new creation, the carbon that you’re made up and every atom of nitrogen has been around since the beginning. It makes you wonder whether or not any of the molecules that you are made of have ever been used in the fabric of a human body, before?
Certainly, almost every molecule you’re made of had previously been used in the fabric of a cow, pig or chicken body. Trim off a piece of fingernail, and look at it because the last time those proteins were animated, just prior to ^your^ use, they were on the hoof eating grass or clucking noisily while laying an egg.
Have you considered that when you rest your hand on your arm, everything you’re touching, (which is, by the way protein and water), was chewed in your mouth and swallowed, digested, and eventually made into the surface that you are touching?
If you look at the top of a modern crematory, the smoke that you see is a mixture of atomized humans and water vapor. But consider that every bit of that water had been taken as a drink by whatever humans were in the crematory. (Or, IV fluids in the case of deceased patients that ended up in said crematory).
If you lived near, or downwind from, a human crematory, how much of the dust in your house and the nitrogen reaching your garden contains atomized human?
Boiling hot day in 25M B.C. and sunlight strikes a tree. A pterodactyl flies by, over the head of a brontosaurus feeding on the lower branches of the tree. Fast forward to now, stored energy in all of those things mentioned about to be released by the engine from the gas tank in a car on I 75