We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? - Richard Dawkins
As I write this Aubrey de Grey and his fellow Biogerontologists are exploring ways to turn us from humans to transhumans. We are, in the decades to come, going to understand our cellular biology so well that we will be able to end or greatly push back this annoying problem called death. Aubrey de Grey and his fellow scientists are exploring regenerative medicine, which is a process of regenerating or replacing human cells, organs, or tissues in the body. This is done by replacing damaged tissue and/or by stimulating the human bodies own repair mechanisms to heal previously irreparable organs or tissues. I was lucky enough to attend a speech by Michio Kaku recently where he spoke of the future of humanity. Among computerized wallpaper, computerized contact lenses, and invisibility cloaks he also mentioned harnessing our biology. We already have 3-D printers printing prosthetic limbs and creating vegan "beef" in the lab for those that don't eat meat, the world of tomorrow is going to be very different. Death will more than likely be a thing of the past.
So I am dating myself while writing this. If for some reason this blog entry survives decades from now and people look at it, it will be in historical context of "oh that's when people died. How weird it must have been for these people." Hopefully, as we all wish this anti-aging discovery will be made available before I die. Of course my luck, it will be discovered and presented for public consumption as I'm 85 years old. So I'll forever be stuck as an 85 year old man all hunched and bitter. Stuck forever - bitching out those damn kids and their bell-bottoms and Jimi Hendrix (because you know it will have looped back around for the 6th time by then and become popular again).
I was talking to my atheist friends recently about death and I mistakenly said that I was terrified of death. They mentioned how they were not terrified of death at all. Are you terrified during Delta Sleep? When the blackness takes over you are neither here nor there. You die every night and we don't live our waking lives in a panic that we will eventually have to go into oblivion later that night when we lay our head down on our pillows. What I was really saying was, like most people, I'm afraid of dying. The process of dying is terrifying. It's the not knowing part of it. The various ways to die are endless. I could die violently and painfully (which is by the way the way most species of animals have died on this planet in Earth's history – A pleasant thought!) or I could die peacefully at an old age of 84. I could die slowly of cancer (odds are high in this country. Plane crash death - odds are low. Car crash death - odds are higher. Do you ever think about how fragile life’s moments are? When you are driving around town, looking briefly at your iPhone or flipping radio stations get that freakish realization that you are driving this hunk of plastic/metal at ridiculous speeds (that weren't really meant for our fragile human frame in case of impact.) It's terrifying to suddenly pulled yourself out of the thick veil of "I'm of course going to be fine as I drive 75 miles an hour down this uneven road" and realize, holy shit this is really happening right now.
Recently "This American Life" aired an episode called "Hit the Road". Act one was about 23-year-old Andrew Forsthoefel and his journey to walk from the east coast of the U.S. to the west coast, interviewing people along the way about what they would tell their 23 year old self if they could. He went through five pairs of shoes and met all kinds of people, recording with his hand held tape recorder their stories. He talks about different types of walking he experienced: speed walking, fear-walking, weep-walking. As he reaches the last hundred miles of his journey he describes his "weep-walking" euphoria. He expresses how he was haunted by the thought of "The End", the end of his journey, yes, but really the end of his life. Tears rolled down my eyes as he poetically examines what coming to grips with one's own death feels like.
As a Christian I believed that the end was not really the end, but the beginning. Yes, it was the end of this life on planet Earth with these bodies we inhabit, but it was the start to a new life. It was a life of being close to God and his Son Jesus Christ. As a Christian I believed Jesus died for my sins (that I inherited at birth - by just being born a human being). This, as I was told, was the single greatest act of love possible. The ultimate sacrificial Lamb - we've probably all seen The Passion of the Christ by now. The bloodier the depiction, the more real your gratefulness becomes as a Christian. This is the ultimate reward as a Christian - getting to go "home" (heaven) to be with Jesus and to thank him for all eternity for what he did for me and
all other Christians.
Well, needless to say, that's sounds terrible now. As an atheist I don't agree with the doctrine of Christianity at it's very opening act. - Original sin. If I do not accept the doctrine of original sin, I certainly don't need "saving" from it. For me, now, the whole story crumbles before it even gets going. So here I am as an open atheist. I’m no longer ashamed. I’m not in the closet about it anymore. So what do I think happens when I die? Nothing of course. We “sleep” forever. Does our consciousness move on? From what I can deduct consciousness is rooted in the functions of our brains and when we die, our brains die. There is zero evidence that our "souls" move on. There is no evidence for a "soul" in the first place. Maybe that would be nice, but that is wishful thinking without evidence to support it. So we can say these things if it makes us feel good, but it must not be treated as anymore than fantasy. As long as we are clear on this. My friend once rightly pointed out that one of the single greatest selling points to Christianity is playing on this "fear of death". It's essentially spiritual "afterlife insurance". Of course there is no evidence for this, but we are fearful animals that need comfort in our predicament of being alive and being conscious of our own demise. This may be uniquely human and it comes with understandably a whole heaping helping of fear.
What is so bad about "nothingness" when we die? Our body breaks down into the elements and feeds the worms, bacteria, and other organisms that will eventually be mixed with water and gases and be burned up billions of years from now when our sun dies. And then the elements that made up our bodies will spread across the cosmos far from this solar system and who knows, we can postulate that those molecules that made up our bodies will one day make up the body of another planet, maybe even another species. Maybe even some distant day billions of years away an intelligent being on some other planet will look up at the stars and realize that that molecules making up its body came from distant stars and planets far away. They came from you. Maybe we came from them?
The most mindboggling thing I can think of at times is getting tiny glimpses of geologic time and juxtaposing it to our primate perception of time living less than ten short decades on this planet. I once wrote this regarding our perception of geologic time and our place in it:
We are animals, living organisms, evolved. We are one species among millions of others here on this planet. A sense of entitlement has greatly hindered us. It has masked our potential and obstructed our ability to put everything in our universe into perspective. You are the ever-changing result of long twisted shells of Time. So rarely really changing we can't even use the word "changing" really. And I say Time with a capital T because I am attempting to express billions of years. Understand where you are, when you are. We are in a universe filled with grandfather black holes and great great grandmother red dwarfs. Over and over like clockwork before there were clocks, and then there are stars, and stars, and stars, and more stars, everywhere, all of the Time. There are stars being born and stars violently dying. And that's just this galaxy. That's just this universe. There are billions and billions of stars, and quite possibly billions and billions of other universes, and long membrane super-strings which could be parallel universes right next to your face at this very moment, and between all of that - a massive amount of empty space - just nothing. And even what we think of as solid, an atom... is Mostly (and I say Mostly with a capital M) empty space. So then here's the Earth – blue, green, growing... for now, but in time-lapse photography this planet is a blink of bluish-green light that flickers then dies out. It’ s been less blue in the past and it will be less blue in the future. I think it’s absolutely imperative that you grasp the endless folds of Time here. Once you get that you can get some sort of frame of reference on what a fraction of a nanoparticle this all is, just passing through. Aren't we all just passing through quickly, really?
When I think about discoveries in cosmology, biology, genetics, etc I have to sit back and bask in a wowed trance. It is enough. I don't need magical stories of elves, unicorns, talking donkeys, burning bushes, a sacrificial God-Son, resurrections, or reincarnation. I don't need to go any further to these extraordinary claims without evidence. It’s enough for me to be able to see back in time at galaxies forming after the big bang with my own eyes through a telescope. What we know because of evidence in the sciences is profound and inspiring enough. Let's just stop for a moment and bask in the discoveries of science, get chills, have our hair stand on end, and smile like a fool. Scientific discoveries are magical enough. Miracles
are nature being nature. Cheap magician tricks like turning water to wine or casting demons into a herd of pigs are laughable in comparison to microwave background radiation, sunspots, the Aurora Borealis, volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon IO, photosynthesis, or cellular respiration.
All life (estimated 99.9%) that has ever lived on planet Earth has gone extinct. Think about that. Death is the default position. "We are going to die and we are the lucky ones." Why are we the lucky ones? We are the lucky ones because most will never be born. All the possible combinations of DNA sequencing and YOU were born. The odds are astoundingly not in your favor of being alive, and yet you are! Will Homo sapiens be the one species that uses its superior intellect to outsmart the one thing we know for certain more than anything else? - All living things die. Let’s hope so, because I, for one, don’t want this Show to end.