Humans spend a lot of time skirting death but don’t think about it.  Driving at high speeds on two-lane highways requires concentration.  Some people don’t concentrate, they may be impaired by alcohol or drugs, or simply have bad luck.  Fifty-thousand people die in highway accidents each year, even with modern vehicle safety features.  During the course of a lifetime, the probability of getting creamed is surprisingly high.  According to the National Safety Council, the odds of dying in a car wreck during one’s lifetime were 1 in 107 as of 2019.  A rather sobering statistic.  Crossing a street in Chicago, descending a flight of stairs, walking next to a cliff face on a windy day, and installing a new roof on a three-story building can be dangerous activities.  Of course, we’re all gonna die, but we’d like to put it off as long as possible.

Years ago, a young friend of mine went spelunking in Columbia and somehow acquired a virulent infection.  He never came back alive.  An acquaintance with early Parkinson’s fell down a flight of stairs.  That was it for him.  Death circles us every day.  Newspapers are full of diseases, wars, murders, an occasional lightning strike, a rare grizzly bear encounter, or a fatal heart attack.  But some people are lucky.  They avoid accidents, are healthy, have good genes, and smoke cigars.  Consider George Burns.  Others seem to have a death wish.  They smoke cigarettes, consume large amounts of alcohol or drugs, or refuse to see a doctor when health issues arise.  The mantra is “it can’t happen to me”.  But it often does happen.  I’ve also heard people say that life is not worth living if we don’t take some chances.  They have a point.  Many of us lead very boring lives.  We need excitement.  We need some thrills.  Consider Evel Knievel.

Seventy thousand years ago, humans didn’t understand life and death.  Myths, rituals, and superstitions evolved into oral histories and spiritual beliefs.  Beliefs varied, but local cultures created deities to explain natural phenomena that defied understanding: the sun and moon, maybe an active volcano, floods, lightning, the stars, or just sudden death.  At some point, humans created an afterlife.  They had to.  Science didn’t exist.  Even today, mythical beliefs and rituals are widely accepted.  We celebrate the changing seasons, historic events, and the intercorrectedness of societal spectacles. They are part of the human condition. I recently noticed a store front with a large sign that identified the Christian Science End Times Center. 

It’s always been an uphill battle for science to find an acceptable place in society as a way to understand reality.  Scientific inquiry was on the fringe until relatively recently.  Poor Galileo had to recant his astronomical views after being tried by The Inquisition.  During the Enlightenment, science stumbled forward, and an understanding of our Universe slowly surfaced and gained acceptance.  I know scientists today who hold strong religious beliefs.  They manage to separate their critical thinking, data-oriented lives from their spirituality, their mythical world of life and death. 

Many people are drawn to myths and rituals.  Hindu meditation, the Catholic mass and communion, Jewish dietary traditions and death watchers, Buddhist chants and life-cycle rites, or the Taoist ritual of Chiao, a rite of renewal.  The list is long.  Rituals are an integral part of religious faiths.  I know Catholics who are ambivalent about the mythical dogma but enjoy the mass.  It’s an act of renewal, maybe a new beginning, a way to go forward to make life meaningful.  It’s very hard to reconcile death, the inevitability of our own demise.  We need meaning!  Without meaning life becomes a vacuum, a cynical, nihilistic existence.

Religious teachings and beliefs often remain static or evolve slowly as a society otherwise progresses.  I’ve heard it said that changes to Catholic tenets require a council to introduce a new idea followed by 400 years of infighting.  As a child, I was told it was a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday, a quick descent to Hell if I died without going to confession. Thankfully that’s changed, and remarkedly, it didn’t take 400 years.  It’s hard to reconcile death, in part because science has informed us that we are insignificant specks in a boundless Universe, a collection of subatomic particles joined together by chemical and biologic processes.  The physical laws and the cosmological vastness of time and space are hard to fathom.  It just scares the Hell out of people.  Death as an end is an amplification of this cumulative fear. 

My 78-year-old body is telling me something.  I’m changing physically and mentally, slowing a bit, a few medical issues.  I’m in pretty good shape and I’ve done a lot in my years on board, but as I approach my end, I think about death more often.  I’ve given religious faith and spirituality a lot of thought through the years and at some point, I declared myself a naturalist.  According to Merriam-Webster, Naturalism is a theory that derives beliefs and meaning from scientific laws to understand reality.  Since the Universe is guided by a set of laws, everything from the behavior of galaxies to the nature of human consciousness can be explained by physical, chemical, and biological properties, an amalgamation of bazillions tiny particles, quarks, photons, neutrons, electrons.  In addition to grasping particle theory, understanding time and space in a warped Universe is rather mind boggling.  There are billions and billions of galaxies out there and billions of stars in each one. 

All of this science makes humans, our lives, everything we do seem insignificant.  Being told that sapiens will become extinct sometime in the near future doesn’t produce warm fuzzy feelings.  Human consciousness, every gram of knowledge, every thought, idea, the total sum of humanity will simply disappear.  In the far distant future, the earth will be absorbed by an ever expanding and dying sun.  This reality doesn’t produce a warm sensation either, but I’m okay with it.  Just think of the potential for intelligent life in the Universe, in the past, present, and future.  Other intelligent beings must exist somewhere in the vastness of time and space.  The odds favor it. How do they view death?  Do they fear it?  Maybe they are highly structured community-based creatures like ants, bees, or termites. 

I have an app on my smartphone called Scale in the Universe 2, created by Carey and Michael Huang.  It’s a fascinating program.  Scale illustrates the relative sizes of objects in the visible Universe in graphic form.  On one end of the size scale is the visible Universe itself, on the other, the smallest measurable length, Planck Length.  In the middle, stands a human figure.  The app allows the viewer to scroll from one end of the size spectrum to the other.  It’s an astonishing piece of work; it’s also accompanied by an eerie musical score.  Planck Length is the smallest measurable distance with meaning, about 10 ^-20 the size of a proton.  According to particle physicists, anything smaller is controlled by quantum behavior and is uncertain.  At the other end of the scale, the visible Universe is approximately 100 billion light years across, where a light year is a mere 9.5 trillion kilometers.  How far out into time and space does the Universe actually extend.  Is it really expanding?  That’s also uncertain.  Scale reinforces the insignificance of humans in the Universe, our life and death struggles, everything we do. 

All of this reminds me of Turtles All the Way Down, an old expression that may have originated somewhere in the annals of Hindu mythology.  It indirectly explains the problem of infinite regression, meaning that an unending series of entities or elements depend on each other, each subsequent element depending on its predecessor.  That’s what I think of while playing with Scale.  What if it’s infinite?  What if the Planck Length is not the end? What if it’s turtles all the way down.  The tiniest particles that make up humans just keep going and going all the way down ultimately becoming tiny parts of new stars and galaxies, planets, black holes, maybe even new, yet to evolve life forms somewhere in the Universe.