What do you believe happens when we die

Hmmm, seems like romantic fantasy from where I'm sitting. The notion that Shakespeare has been globally redistributed such that every person on the planet has a constituent number of billions of the bards atoms would take some proving. Worth remembering that vast quantities of organic material goes nowhere and does not get recycled as more organisms, e.g. think of fossil fuels. If we take the notion that we each have a few billion atoms of Genghis Khan for example, firstly I'd be interested in seeing the statistic that suggests somebody buried in 13th century China would share matter of some kind with me and by extension every one else. Say that were the case, the direct implication is that I share matter with every other person that ever lived more than a certain time ago, and similarly every other reasonably large animal or plant. The same would need to hold true for everyone else alive today. Not convinced.

How long though would it take for one litre water to become evenly mixed throughout all the bodies of water on the planet, to the degree that any other litre would contains water molecules from that litre? On what basis are we assuming such an even redistribution would ever take place, not just in one instance but in every instance? Much like homoeopathy tablets, I would guess most litres of water don't contain any actual Shakespeare ;)

It's the 'assume uniform mixing' that I'd query there. You pour a litre of water into the Avon, how long roughly does it take for that liter to be evenly distributed across the planet's water supply, such that every liter likely to utilized in the formation of another person contains billions of atoms from the original source. How about an amount of water that Genghis peed into the Mongolian desert? Even then, we seem to be assuming that when talking about the atoms that Shakespeare or Genghis Khan possessed we're happy to include the sum total of their urination, feces and any other excretions over the course of their lives.

I suppose the big difference here is that we can tease any scientific assertion out with questions and refine our understanding as a result. What Bryson says may be reasonable on the basis of a number of broad assumptions and less so on others. I think the language he uses in this quote is misleading, so for example saying that we are "vigorously recycled at death" at an atomic level suggests to me he is talking about human remains specifically, as opposed say to various excretions over our life time. The other arguments here supporting Bryson's quote would suggest that if anything, we are more vigorously recycled during life. Either way, the notion of sharing atoms with Shakespeare or Genghis Khan to me seems very much like a romantic notion that isn't particularly meaningful, provable or of scientific value. I'd agree it does have that in common with a religious assertion.