Neil deGrasse Tyson advocates for natural burial as a way to return his body’s chemical energy to Earth’s ecosystem, contrasting it with cremation which sends that energy into space as light.
In a recent episode of his StarTalk podcast, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson detailed his preference for traditional burial over cremation, grounding his choice in the first law of thermodynamics which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Tyson explained that while cremation converts the body’s stored chemical energy into infrared radiation that “radiates it out into space, moving at the speed of light,” he prefers a natural decomposition process where his energy is recycled back into the local ecosystem.
“If I’m buried and I decompose, all that energy gets absorbed by microbes, by flora and fauna dining upon my body the way I have dined upon flora and fauna my whole life,” Tyson remarked, noting that this “giving back to the Earth” allows a person’s molecules to remain a functional part of the terrestrial food chain rather than exiting the planet as heat.