In no more than five years, practically every atom in the organiism gets replaced. The vast majority of atoms are replaced far more often. Identity, body structure, appearance, and consciousness are preserved but the atoms have gone. The feeling of individual continuity is real enough, but it has no material foundation. Interesting things happen when and where order meets chaos.
People live on coasts, rivers, mountain chains, mountain passes, near boundaries.
Neat the transition from one element to another. The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. But that is what we are consciously trying to do with the artificial lives we live in our technological civilization. Most of the world has to be described through nonlinear mathematics i.e., formulae and forms that are not regular and smooth but marked by the fact that the tiniest change can lead to a huge difference, because things bend and break everywhere. Our civilization is completely different from nature.