What happens to the energy we release into an environment after we are gone?

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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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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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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