After waiting in the long customs queue at JFK airport in New York City a few years ago, I found myself before an agent with a dour expression. He wondered: What kind of work, exactly, requires a trip to Europe and back in less than three days? As I drew breath to explain my job as an editor at Scientific American, his eyes dropped to the slim volume in my hand, and he suddenly beamed. “Oh, I read that book, and it was terrific.” He handed me back my passport. “Welcome home.”
The book? Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W. W. Norton, 2003), by Mary Roach. I’d heard it was witty and thought it would be diverting for a long international flight. It was. In fact, I was well into the chapter on what happens to bodies during airplane crashes before I noticed I’d been reading it at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. After a pause (in which I confess I thought about the wisdom of tempting fate), I read on. I was rewarded with fascinating scientific information and, more than that, a good story.
You just never know when a willingness to engage with possibly uncomfortable topics might have an upside. Now that you have reached the beginning of “The End,” our annual special single-topic issue, we hope it will provide similar benefits. As you read, you may come to appreciate, as I have, how an apparent finish can often be just another way to open a new door. Click here for a thoughtful introduction to the feature section by staff editor Michael Moyer, who organized the issue.
That is not to say it is always easy to take a hard look at finales. When it comes to contemplating our own mortality, the nature of our consciousness actually makes it impossible to imagine the world without us. Consider, as Jesse Bering, director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast, wrote in our sister publication, Scientific American Mind, that you will never know you have died: “You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a ‘you’ around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened.”
Partly for this reason—the difficulty and possible discomfort about some of the topics we wanted to cover—the editors have mulled and then put aside this issue annually for the past few years. How would people react? Would it “die” on the newsstand? (Ouch, I know.) For my part, I find contemplating the future fascinating, whether it is my own, the planet’s or even the universe’s: this issue explores all three and then looks at what comes after the end in many related areas as well. The topic also seems the perfect alpha-and-omega bookend to our single-themed issue last year, “Origins.”
When you’re done with this issue, you can find more on the home page of www.ScientificAmerican.com, including a special interactive package about the feature article, “How Much Is Left?” which was developed with Zemi. And during the week of August 23, you can listen to several of the editors and other experts in interviews and related stories on WNYC’s national morning radio news program “The Takeaway” (more at www.ScientificAmerican.com/TheEnd). As always, let us know what you think.
This article was originally published with the title Start of the End.
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8 Comments
Add CommentWow Mariette, really looking forward to this issue, I was a great fan of last year's Origins issue, and the Origins re-run last month was equally engaging. I hope to hear some discussion in the September pages on the (empirical) reports of how "our life flashes before our eyes"....sounds like someone doing a backup to disk!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyep, it's still summer vacation at SA.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe link in the following paragraph has a typo in it, it has "re" instead of "er" in "scientificamerican"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou just never know when a willingness to engage with possibly uncomfortable topics might have an upside. Now that you have reached the beginning of The End, our annual special single-topic issue, we hope it will pro�vide similar benefits. As you read, you may come to appreciate, as I have, how an apparent finish can often be just another way to open a new door. Click here for a thoughtful introduction to the feature section by staff editor Michael Moyer, who organized the issue.
Something queazy I've always thought about was, what if the end isn't?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTechnology of the future being completely unknown. What if we die and wake up in some alien's lab, or on the hard-drive of their computer as a software program.
(needn't be an alien- but a historian from Earth's future).
Just because we die- doesn't mean we won't be around to know it. How many contempary historians would love to awake one of the world's "ice men" and have a conversation with them about their future.
May sound impossible, but we can "read" what happened in the universe billions of years ago.
What's to say that in 100,000 years historians won't be able to replicate the dead and wake them for a chat over a cup of hot-cocoa. (virtual hot-cocoa for the dead).
When I was a child, I had hoped that by the time I was old, there'd be a way to keep our minds alive chemically and networked electronically as part of a beyond-death collective of human consciousness. A sort of living history of the species.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know small steps have been taken, but I thought it would be further along.
Why oh why cant we accept one day we shall be no-more and that will be that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSomebody resurrecting you in the future, from what? All your cells will be dead, dna gone, memories non-existent. Even if a cell remained undamaged and they created a new creature from that it wont be you. Have you considered where the sence of you exists? Not in a cell or collection of cells I can assure you. I am a electro-chemical entity generated by interactions between cells, not necessarily just neurons. When these cells stop interacting to sustain this matrix I don't exist any more - forever (whatever forever means).
I really enjoyed the sentence: "You just never know when a willingness to engage with possibly uncomfortable topics might have an upside."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI couldn't help but thinking that, if you could survive being close enough to one, death is almost analogous to crossing the event horizon of a black hole. Once you've done it, it's too late to turn back, nor would you realize that you can't. Realistically, it's likely very similar to being given a general anesthetic. You start counting backwards, and don't remember anything once it all goes black.
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