Energy can’t be created or destroyed.
We release energy and logically it can only transform.
Let’s say that I’m standing in a room. I stay there for a while and then get out. What happens with the energy I released into the room when I leave it? How does it transform?
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energy is not a thing by itself it is a quantitative property of diffrent phenomena where the sum of it is constant. So you can release energy in general, and you can realize it in a specific way.
So to say you release energy does not really make sense, you need to specify what type of energy. If you relate the energy as radio waves it is quit possible that just travels through the wall and it do not stay in the room.
If you lift up a book from the foot to a shelf you add gravitational potential energy to it. Noting will happen with that energy if the shelf is stable and the book remains there.
If you go into a room that is colder than you you transfer thermal energy from your body heat to it which heat it up. If we assume the room is perfectly insulated so as not to heat transfer out if it is possible the temperature will just remain the same. In reality, there is no perfect insulation so the room with change heat with is surrounding, If it is cooler around it thermal energy will leak out. If it is warmer around it the room will heat up.
So the answer to the question depends on how you put energy into the room.
Without getting too nano-scale, let’s say the act of entering or leaving a room means you have to push air out of your way. You are taking a very small part of the kinetic energy used to move your body and transferring it to the air. Once you stop moving, that airborne energy slowly dissipates throughout the air in the room in ever smaller perturbations like ripples on a pond. Eventually all the energy you transferred to the air will be either lost to friction (creating heat) or absorbed by other materials, possibly being converted back to a form of mechanical energy (call it motion). Ever walked quickly past a desk and had some papers rustle a bit? That’s what’s happening.
When you or any other biological entity dies, some of your component molecules are disassembled and some chemical reactions occur. Parts of you will change state, going from (semi)solid to liquid and maybe on to gas. Some of these reactions can happen relatively quickly, some take decades. Some molecules like water are very stable and last millions of years. Your coffee this morning contained water molecules once drank then peed out by dinosaurs.
I shouldn’t limit this to biological entities, chemical reactions happen to non-biologicals as well. Seawater is slightly alkaline at pH 8.1, acid rain can be highly acidic at 4.5 or lower. Metals and minerals in both environments can be affected.
Seeing the world around you as a series of interacting energy systems can be quite beautiful at times.
The energy gets transferred to nearby objects warming them up by. A degree or two. From there it gets transferred again to nearby matter but the effect is less because the energy is spread out more. From, there it gets transferred again. And so on and so on.
Eventually, some of the energy gets radiated out into space. The net effect is that the ambient temperature of the universe is increased by an infinitesimal amount. Since the universe is expanding, this might actually just mean the universe cools slight less quickly.
The energy is still there it just keeps spreading out until it’s hard to measure.
To skip all the imtermediate processes, the ultimate answer is that it gets released as heat and escapes into the universe, essentially in an unusable form.
Pretty much any kind of work will create heat, and that heat will be radiated away as low energy EM radiation that will eventually escape the atmosphere and disappear into the void of space. It’s really only a matter how how many steps it takes to do this.
For your example, the average human body outputs like 100W of power. You enter a room, your body is warm. Some of that warmth transfers to the gas in the room, some of your kinetic energy is transferred to the floor from your motion. That heat can either conduct to other surfaces and transfer around, or radiate, cooling the gas/floor. Once it’s radiated as EM radiation, it can be absorbed by another surface, restarting the process (heat conducts to other things, or is emitted again) until it dissipates and everything comes back into equilibrium. Alternatively, the radiation can bounce around being reflected until it’s not hitting surfaces anymore, and it escapes the atmosphere into space.
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