Radiolab - After Life

Episode Date: July 27, 2009

This hour: Radiolab stares down the very moment of passing, and speculates about what may lie beyond.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-C. See? Yeah.

And NPR. One. When you die, we can all agree on this, something changes. You get the feeling that something that was there, isn't there, or leaves. But what leaves? One, two, three. Can you hear me? We talked to a biologist at Princeton University, Lee Silver, who told us a story about a guy back in 1907 who did a very interesting experiment.

His name was Duncan McDougal. I don't remember exactly who he was. He was a doctor. A doctor. A physician, yes. And what's his story? He wanted to prove that the soul exited the body after death. He thought the soul had a certain amount of weight, that it was a substance.

And so what he did was he had these people who were dying from tuberculosis. And they were lying on beds on this gigantic scale. He literally put people almost dying onto a scale. Yes. So imagine now a patient on one side of the scale. And on the other side are weights, and they're in perfect balance. And then at the moment of death... Right at the last breath.

He tried to determine whether or not the scale changed. So did they lose weight when they died? That was the question. Right. And he claimed that on average, they lost 21 grams. The instant they died. Does he describe the moment that suddenly the scales shift one way or the other? Yeah, the moment, I mean, death was easy in those days because you stopped breathing.

You were dead. I mean, they weren't hooked up to machines. Right. So it's the last breath. And the New York Times headline was, Soul Has Weight Physician Thinks. Right. Great headline, right? Yeah, pretty good.

And this is the beginning in the 20th century. We're not talking about medieval times. What did he conclude from this? Soul has weight, okay? I've seen a soul. It was there when he was alive, and it flew off, and it weighs 21 grams. Yes. Now, there was one person whose weight didn't change immediately.

It changed a minute later. And so his hypothesis was that this was a very kind of dumb guy, and the soul didn't realize it was free. And so it took a minute after the death before the soul realized it was free, and it flew out of the body. So a true idiot would be hanging out like for five minutes, where the soul didn't know where to go. Right.

Now, this was very serious, of course. How would you explain what he saw or thought he saw? The 21 grams. I'm still stuck on that. Oh, the 21 grams. It's this statistically insignificant. I mean, three quarters of an ounce compared to the weight of a body is a minuscule amount. Particularly, says Lee, when you consider how crude the scales were at the time,

almost anything could assuade them. A breeze, a pressure, anything really. Today, he would be laughed out of the academy. Have you ever seen someone die or ever seen a dead person? I've seen dead people. I mean, I've seen dead bodies. I've... Do you...

I mean, I saw my mom just before she died and just after she died. Yes. And I thought to myself, there's a real difference here. It's beyond power or... It's a very noticeable, deep absence of something. And it does make you think that something... I'll use the word carefully,

vital has gone away suddenly. We have to be very careful about the words. I mean, something has gone away. The brain has ceased to function, and therefore I would say there is no person. But still, the unanswered question is, what really happens in that moment when a person is suddenly gone to...

The other side. The other side. Those of us with the benefit being alive cannot help but ask this question. It's like a curse. We want to know. But obviously it's not something we can know. Because this will just always be one of those domains. Where the tools of science just can't be used.

Alas. But then there are those folks like neuroscientist David Eagleman who say, screw it. We're going to ask. We're going to wonder, because that's just what we do. When you walk to the end of the pier of science, you look out and you've got everything beyond that. You've got the whole ocean of what we don't know past the end of the pier. What a scientist does is sort of leap out onto different islands and just try things out.

I'm Chad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Bilwich. Today on Radio Lab, we're going to do what David Eagleman suggests. We're just going to hop around. This is unusual for us, but what the heck? We're going to look at different aspects of death and the other side in no particular order. But here's what we can tell you. We're going to make 11 stops, 11 meditations, shall we call them, on various questions relating to...

Death and dying. And what happens after? but it won't be depressing. No. You just heard the first one. Soul has weight physician thinks. Here's our second. It comes to us from the guy you just heard David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist, but wrote a book called Some.

Yeah. Which is very not neuroscientcy at all. The truth is I haven't talked about this book with any of my science colleagues. Why not? I have reasons why, but I'm not sure I want to say them on the radio. In any case, the book consists of 40 different versions of the afterlife. And here's one. It's called Metamorphosis, written by David Eagleman, and read by Jeffrey Tambor.

The Ector. Right. There are three deaths. Now, the first is when the body ceases to function, of course. And the second is when the body is consigned or put in the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future when your name is spoken for the last time. So, you wait. in this lobby until the third death.

There are long tables with coffee and tea, cookies. You can help yourself, and there are people here from all around the world. And with a little effort, you can strike up some convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation could be interrupted at any moment by, well, we call them the callers. And what they do is they broadcast your new friend's name to indicate. that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the earth. Your friend slumps, saddened even though the callers. They tell him kindly, look, you're off to a better place.

The thing is, no one knows where that better place is or what it offers, because no one exiting through that door has returned to tell us. And tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering, and we all wag our heads at that typical timing. Now, not everyone is sad when the callers shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and they plead. These are generally the guys who've been here a long time.

Too long. Take that farmer over there who drowned in a small river 200 years ago. Get this, his farm is the site of a small college now, and the tour guides each week tell his story, so he's stuck. He's miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He's utterly alienated from his name. It's no longer identical with him, but it continues to bind.

And that chairless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart, believe me, were complicated. And I guess that is the curse of this room. Because since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be. What gave you the idea for that story? This actually, I should say, came out of my work as a neuroscientist because what happens in the brain is you make models of other people.

When you think, well, what would my friends such and such say? Or what would my wife say? you're actually running a little simulation of that person in your head. Well, what happens when somebody dies is that they exist only in the scattered heads around the globe of people who knew them. They exist in some way as these algorithms that continue to run. But through time, your model of somebody might drift. Ready? Number three.

You're going to change up the question a bit. When am I dead? How do you decide if somebody's... alive or dead. If you take it as your starting point, King Lear, from Shakespeare, when Cordelia, his daughter dies, how? Lear takes

out a mirror. Let me a looking glass. He puts it right under her nose to see if there's some breath there. Then he takes out a feather. And does the same thing. And that is how he decides if she's on or off. Yes, and it's really

one of the most beautiful scenes in Shakespeare. That's Gary Greenberg. He wrote a book called The Noble Lie. When it's done right, it's impossible not to weep at that scene. And the intimacy of that moment. But if you fast forward a few hundred years, things change. All right, it is 1816. There's a fat lady in a hospital. We're in France. It in walks, a guy by the... What was his name?

Theophile excreanches Leannach. Lannach. He's a doctor. He's a doctor. This fellow? Yes. And he is called in to consult with a patient who is obese. Obes and ill.

He says to this lady, please, may I see your wrist so that I can feel your pulse? But this woman had so much flesh on her that the only way he could imagine to do it was to put his ear on her chest, which would have been indecent. Hmm. So he came up with an idea. He fabricated quite quickly a device, rolled up paper, really, and fashioned it into a tube, put one end of the tube on the woman's chest, and his ear on the other end. Oh, how very decent of him, so he doesn't have to touch her flesh.

He doesn't have to even really look at her chest. His head is actually turned away from the patient. And so what we've got here in 1816 is, is the world's first stethoscope. And a very unintimate but increasingly precise and technological approach to defining death, which now

is all about the heart. Up until then, death was heart death. People are dead when their heart stops beating. But if you fast forward again, things take another term. Just imagine thought experiment if King Lear had been written

not in 1604, but 1968. LBJ administration. Gay Cordelia would die. Lear would be distraught, but instead of doing the mirror thing again, he would call a doctor who would rush her to the hospital, shock her heart, resuscitate her, hook her up to a ventilator and a feeding tube, and there she would be. Alive again? Sort of. I mean, technically, yes, she'd be alive because her heart would be, but the Cordelia that he knew, his daughter, would be gone.

but I'm wide awake. My mind is sleeping, but I'm wide awake. And this was the problem in 1968 with all this new technology. ICU units were filling up with these purgatorial cordelias who floated somewhere in a comatose state between life and death. You could minister to these people, you could feed them, You could clear their infections, but you could not restore their consciousness. What are you going to do with these people?

Inwalks a physician. A very prominent American physician named Henry Beecher. And he decided that the time had come to acknowledge the obvious, which to him was, These people weren't just dying. They were dead. He convened a committee at Harvard, and he simply moved the line that divides life from death back a little bit toward what most people would consider life. And so you get in that moment the concept of brain death.

A person is really dead, really dead. Not when they stop breathing, not when their heart stops beating, but when their brain winks out. That now is when a person really dies. Exactly. Totally invented concept, but it stuck. One way to argue it was that the brain was considered to be sort of the maestro, the coordinating organ that made all of the rest of,

of the body work, and that without it, the center no longer holds, and things fall apart. And nowadays, most people go with this brain-dead definition of death, but where it gets weird is that there are some holdouts. Just a few. For instance, some sex of Orthodox Judaism will say that if the heart is beating, the lungs are still filling with air, and if the lungs are still filling with air... There's still a soul. The spirit of God is in you, and you certainly can't be said to be dead. Well, I'll give you another example. John Troyer, associate of death and dying practices at the University of Bath. For example, Italy, they use brain death criteria.

The Vatican, however, its own city-state within the country of Italy does not. The Vatican goes only by heart death. So technically, according to John, it's possible that if I were brain dead in Italy, a doctor wanted to pull my plug, but my family didn't, they could just wheel me down the street into the Vatican and, foing, I'd be alive. Again. Yeah, I mean, you'd need a really long extension cord probably to make, Because, of course, these are all...

I mean, you'd be on machines and devices that require power, so, you mean, it would be a laborious process, to say the least. Nonetheless, the real question here, the deeper one, isn't when do you die as a brain versus heart. It's when are you gone? Like, when is a father, a son, a daughter? Really gone to us. And who gets to decide that?

And that's therein lies the rub. Dead to family can be very different than dead to an institution that might be caring for that body. You know, that scene of Lear with the mirror and the feather. She's gone. It's not a medical diagnosis. It's a diagnosis about love and loss. Cordelia, stay a little. And number four.

Tennis, anyone? Let me tell you about a woman. She was the victim of a road truck. That's Dr. Adrian Owen. He's a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, and he told me about this patient he had. A patient who's in her 30s, and she came to us after five months in a vegetative state following, a blow to her head. So for five months she'd been lying in the hospital. Couldn't talk or couldn't move. She could breathe, but...

No evidence of any awareness. You could shine light in her eyes. She wouldn't have the normal response. In effect, that woman was gone. That's right. But in spite of the fact that she was giving the world nothing back, Dr. Owen wondered, would it just be possible that there was somebody in there? So we tried a new kind of approach with her. Because they had a new and sophisticated tool,

the previous scientists had never had. You mean a rain scanner? Yeah, this is a stethoscope for the brain. Dr. Owen stood by her bedside and said, tell you what, in a few minutes, We're going to take you to a machine. You chat with her? You say, hey.

That's exactly how it's done. Yes, it sounds a little bit bizarre, because, of course, you don't get any responses back from these patients. You don't even know whether they can hear you. But we make the instructions very clear. And he says, now, when we put you in the machine, there's going to be a click. And I'm going to say, into your ear, please begin.

To imagine playing a vigorous game of tennis. What? We said, imagine that you're standing there at the baseline at Wimbledon, carrying out the movements. Tennis? Because here's the thing. We now know enough about brains to know that if you are imagining tennis...

That will produce activity in your motor cortex, very similar to the activity that you would see if you could scan somebody when they were actually playing a game of tennis. And this is true of all healthy people. That's right. Always the same pattern? Yeah.

It lights up very reliably. Okay, so he puts this patient into a brain scan. He rolls her into the machine. And we say, right, play tennis. Now relax. Play tennis Now relax You said this woman's been vacant for five months

Yeah I gotta say this seems quite literally a shot Or a forehand in the dark This was his first patient Really? He does this he says play Stop Play

Play tennis Stop She hadn't spoken or showing any sense of awareness Or any interior life at all For months and months and months and months And On the screen Here's a tennis game.

What we saw is exactly what we see in healthy volunteers. Her premotor cortex was turning on and turning off when we asked her to relax, turning on when we asked her to do the task, and it would stop when we asked her to relax. So she's in there. She's in there. Were you amazed or were you expected? What happened to you?

Well, I mean, it was pretty exciting. I mean, I have to say the fact that it was the first person we tried it in was perhaps the biggest surprise. And we've scanned about 20 patients since then doing the same thing, and we've seen three so far who showed clear signs of being aware. See, that's the thing that sort of frightens me about what you've done. It seems to me you've discovered that there may have been. and there may be lots of people in this world who are somehow aware, but who are invisible to the rest of us,

whom we could in effect murder by mistake. Yeah, well, that's obviously a very loaded question. I mean, I think we have to face the fact that historically, we haven't always had the tools that we have today that can help us to make complex decisions. But we're at very early stages of this, and there are some also very technical reasons why one needs to be extremely cautious

about drawing conclusions from this. For example, we could tell with this patient that she was aware. But what we can't do is to conclude that the rest of them were definitely unaware. Imagine if you were stone deaf. You appeared to be in a vegetative state. Now, in that situation, we wouldn't necessarily know that you were stone deaf

because you've had a major brain injury and we can't talk to you and find out. So we don't know that you're stone deaf. We put you in the scan and we ask you to imagine playing tennis, but you can't even hear the instructions. Now, clearly, that patient wouldn't imagine playing tennis. They wouldn't activate their premotor cortex. But it wouldn't be because they weren't aware. it would be because they were deaf.

Oh, dear. So even though we can tell when a patient is aware, we can't tell when a patient is unaware. And that's very, very important distinction. But if you can't really know that someone is unaware, then you can't actually ever really know if they're gone. We've entered into this very difficult space where we have learned enough to know that we know

much less than we thought. Message 1. Hi, this is Gary Greenberg. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Offord P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Message 2. This is Ken Baldwin. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio.

End of message. Hello, I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. We're back from our break. What do we do during our breaks? What would you say we do during our breaks? We don't do anything.

We don't exist. Really? And we're going to continue with our show here. How many meditations? Eleven. Eleven. Eleven meditations on things relating to death and what happens after. But we're not up to 11.

No. Five. It's called? Four seconds down. From producer Soren Wheeler. Wake up. Everything's pretty black. Same as it has been the last couple of weeks.

This is Ken Baldwin. The day he's talking about is August 20th, 1985. Say goodbye to my wife, and I just say, you know, I'll be home late, do some overtime. At the time, he's living a couple hours east of San Francisco. Say goodbye, say I love her. And I know right now that I won't survive the day. She has no idea how I feel. Everything is dark. Everything is black. So I get in my car. I'm just not a very good person. Drive to work because I think maybe I can do it one more day. The closer I get to work, the more I realize I've got to disappear to start over and get rid of whatever it is I've got. It's got to end. I drive right past work. And then I'm on the freeway. Kind of relaxed. And I finally see the bridge and it's huge. It's gigantic. He parks his car

at the bridge, puts money in the meter. And I start walking and I'm walking on the bridge just like any other tourist. It's a beautiful day. It's a gorgeous Wednesday. I see everything around me and It's just gorgeous. And I find a place. It's an outcropping. You can see straight down into the water. And I say, this is time to do it. You really got to do this.

I really believed that everybody would be better off without me. That everybody would just get on with their lives, feeling better about me being gone than me being here. I put my hands on the railing, count to 10 go and I vaulted over and the last things I

saw leave the bridge were my hands and that moment that very moment I said oh my God this is a mistake and nothing I can do about it except fall the fall from the bridge to the water

takes about four seconds and it was almost like quick flickers of what I was trying to think, oh, my family. My daughter, three years old, I'll never see her grow up. The things she's going to see that I don't get to see. Man, the misery that I caused, this is bad. I'm sorry, guys, that I did this to you.

I do want to live. This is how it's going to end. And I just blacked out. And I woke up, and I was swimming for my life, and I was saying, oh, my God, somebody please save me. Somebody saved me. He hit the water in a cannonball. He bruised his feet, his backside, but no serious injuries.

Some workers saw him jump and called the Coast Guard. And then the next thing I remember, I was on the Coast Guard cutter. Only 26 people have made it onto that boat, out of a thousand or so that have jumped. And nearly all of them say that in the middle of the fall, when they're facing their death, something inside them changed. And they didn't want to die. For Ken, that change happened. The very moment he saw his hands leave the bridge.

I can see that perfectly. I can see my hands leave the bridge. I don't know if it was a mechanical switch or some kind of switch in the brain function, but for some reason it became a switch to another life. Number six. Am I dead? Ooh, I hear some seagulls. You hear the seagulls, yeah.

Where are they coming from? We're just on the edge of the English Channel and the Atlantic here. Really? So they've got you in a little box floating in the ocean? Actually, we're not that far away from the sea, so we get lots of seagulls here. This is Paul Brocks. He's not really floating in a box in the ocean. He's just in a box near the ocean.

And the reason we've connected our box in New York to his in England is because of a question he was once asked. You know, I mean, if you work in the sort of line that I've worked in over the years, you get the most bizarre statements and questions. Which is because Paul's a neuropsychologist, which means he diagnoses patients with various mental disorders. And he describes this one case about eight years ago involving a woman named Jeannie. Just an ordinary, pleasant, middle-aged woman from the north of England.

Early 50s. Well loved by a family. She comes into his office. He runs it through some basic tests. I just did a basic assessment of, as I would in that sort of case, of general intellectual level. And at first she seemed pretty with it. She answered all his questions. She seemed pretty alert.

But then... Well, she would... We then got a conversation about whether things seemed real. What does that mean? Well, it's difficult to pin that one down. She just felt that things weren't real. She would point to objects in the room and say, well, that cup there doesn't seem real, does it? Or the chair doesn't seem real.

real. It just doesn't feel real. So I can see it and I can describe it to you. But it just doesn't feel real. And the thing that really made me sit up was when she said, I forget the exact phrase, but it's in the book. Eventually, Jeannie said, am I dead? Am I dead? Yes. Do you think I'm dead? Do you think I'd die? I didn't respond immediately. And I let the silence flow. Jeannie smiled. Her face was lit with a benign perplexity. There was a smear of toothpaste around the corner of her mouth. She didn't seem to notice the droplets of tea

spinning onto her dressing gown, but there was a glint in her eye. In the middle of the night, I was convinced, she said. I thought they would come to take me away. I can't say for sure that I'm dead, she continued. But things are not the same. I don't feel real. It seems to me I might be dead.

It immediately made me think this may be an example of Kotard's syndrome. No one really knows what causes Kotart's syndrome. It's very rare. I mean, I've come across three cases. But one of the symptoms, he says, is often this sense, a deep sense, that you're somehow not completely here. Well, one idea about this syndrome is that somehow there's a decoupling of thoughts and feelings. Which means what exactly?

Here's how I explain it to me. The brain has two jobs it's doing at all times. The first is to keep track of what's happening outside your body, like the sights that are coming at you, smell, touch, your sensual experience of the world. That's that immediate consciousness of the body and the world and the body being in the world. All the while, the brain also is maintaining this inner life where you think thoughts. and you have memories, personality. What you normally think of when you think about yourself?

You, right? What do you think happens in this condition? Is that that outer you... It's a sensual self. Somehow gets cut, cut off from that inner mental you, and it just drifts off to see leaving you with just thoughts.

But it's the feelings that give us our in-the-moment sense of self. So if you don't have feelings attached to thoughts, and perceptions. Then you're like vapor. You're there, but you have no weight. Isn't what you're describing basically one version of the afterlife? Like my body is gone, but something remains? Yeah, I hadn't thought of that.

It's a very interesting way to think about it. But is that any different than the story persisting in someone else's head? Seven. Do you guys know this group, The Edge? Edge.org? It's John Brockman's group. Yeah, we do. That's David Eagleman again. And for number seven, a brief excerpt from a conversation we had with him, if I only had a brain.

So I just wrote an essay on there yesterday. It came out. Is this big ideas that will change the world? Exactly. Yeah. What's the thing that'll change everything? And my answer was, and I think this is something I'll actually see in my lifetime. So the idea is silicon immortality. In other words, downloading your consciousness into a computer and will really have reached a new point where there'll be immortality. How would you figure this would work? So imagine you make an exact copy of the three-dimensional structure of the brain, all the neurons, all the connections between the neurons,

the proteins inside, the phosphorylation states of the proteins, you make a copy of this whole thing. What matters is the algorithms that are running on top of the brain. It's not the wet, gushy stuff that matters. It's what that wet, gushy stuff is implementing. And the idea is that if you could recreate the brain out of, let's say, beer cans and tennis balls, and you get all the structure the same

and it runs the same algorithms, then that would be you. It would have your consciousness, your memories, your thoughts, and so on. Now, right now, it's science fiction because it's so much data our current computers couldn't handle it. Is that the only limitation,

just the hard drive size? No, there's other limitations. There are two limitations right now. One is our imaging technology and the other is the amount of storage capacity. And error. I mean, you get one atom or two wrong and all of a sudden instead of your cat named Coco,

it's now named Boko, and then you're not the same person. No, that's not true, in fact, because every time you hit your head on a cabinet, you're actually killing lots of neurons, but that doesn't change who you are. You don't misremember your cat's name. I mean, imagine that you changed one word in the novel Moby Dick. It would still be Moby Dick.

Well, be almost Moby Dick. It would be almost Moby Dick, but you are almost the same person day to day, and you're never exactly the same person that you were yesterday, because of small changes in your brain. But let's imagine that you're right, despite Robert's objections. I'm not even imagining you. Let's just say you are.

I'm just listening to the hubris of this. What would you actually do with a Xerox brain? He wants to be immortal. Don't you haven't you gotten this? No, no, no. He's doing this in his own lifetime. No, no, but how would you interface with a Xerox brain? So the idea is if we can recreate a brain in zeros and ones on a computer,

then you could actually live inside of a virtual world. and you could enjoy living in this world indefinitely. Or like the scarecrow. If I only had a brain. He didn't have a real brain. He had straw and a certificate. Well, you don't actually know that you have a real brain either, right? What?

There are modern philosophers who deal with this in a very, in a real way, they ask, how would we know if we are a simulation? Why would we die if we were a simulation? He's not going to die. That's the way. Ah. Well, so this is the point of my book, Some, is to illustrate that there are lots of possibilities out there, right?

Here it comes. Yeah. Go ahead. I don't interrupt you, because you're about to become immortal. So there are many different stories written here, and some of them, God is actually a married couple that got separated and then reunited, or that God is the size of a microbe.

Eight? Did we say eight? Or is it nine? I think it was nine. No, no, I think we're eight. Ineffable. Another story by David Eagleman. From his book, Some. Read first again by actor Jeffrey Tambor.

When soldiers part ways at war's end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the, well, the death of a person. It's the final bloodless death of the war. The same mood haunts actors. on the drop of the final curtain, after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its doors on its final evening or Congress wraps its final session, the participants ambled away, feeling that they were just part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life, even though they can't quite put a finger on it. In this way, death is not only for humans, but for everything that exists.

existed. And it turns out that anything that enjoys life enjoys an afterlife. Platoons and plays and stores and Congresses, they don't end. They just move on to a different dimension. Although it's difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy this delicious afterlife together. They exchange stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times and often, well, just like us, just like humans. They lament. meant how short this thing is, how brief it is. It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who compose them, but the underlying principle, it's simple.

The afterlife is made of spirits. I mean, after all, you don't bring your kidney or your liver or your heart to the afterlife with you. Instead, you gain independence from the pieces that make you up. Now, a consequence of this cosmic scheme is going to surprise you. When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. Yeah. I mean, they hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities a spleen, but with your death, they don't die.

Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together. actually haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something, well, they can hardly put a finger on. Hi, my name's Josh, and I'm calling from Harlem, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.

This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Crilwood. Today on the show, 14 meditations, 12. 11. 11. 11. Meditations on the moment of death and what happens after. Now number eight.

Nine, nine. A title which simply escapes me. Buya, Mozart. From producer Lulu Miller. Hi there. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, great. So I called up this guy at the University of Leicester.

Jan Velashevich. I'm a geologist who basically works on Earth history. By day. But in his spare time, he's been studying what he calls. Future fossils. Like, let's go ahead, 100 million years. Which is roughly the time that separates us from the dinosaurs. We will be dead.

All the species that are around us will be dead. So I asked him, will any of our stuff, the books we write, the buildings we make, Will any of that still be here? And here's what he found. Concrete is probably going to preserve pretty well. Glass will preserve, but it will probably turn opaque. Bits of brickwork, corroded piping, some types of plastic, and our rubbish dumps all sound a pretty good chance of being preserved.

What about paper? Paper, do we know about that? Paper is, again, we can treat that. Paper is plant material. It will carbonize. Just as when we see fossil plants, they can be. They preserved for tens or even hundreds of millions of years. So the shape of paper will be preserved almost forever.

But the print, the print on paper will almost certainly be lost. If you have a book preserved, it will be like a little piece of oblong coal. So the ideas that we produce, that I cannot see surviving us. You know, so Shakespeare and Gerta and all the people we call the immortals, you know, Mozart, music, that information, I think, will be lost forever. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Ten, ten. Cyberternity. It's a word of our own coinage.

Cyberternity. And it comes to us from producer Emily Voight. The story's about dealing with death in a world where no one really dies. At the center of the story is a guy named Wyatt Amin. I knew Wyatt, and I'd consider him my best friend. That's Donald Dover. Wyatt and I both had office jobs at the same time, and together we decided that this wasn't enough

because both of us were spending so much time in front of computers. So the goal was going to be to join the Peace Corps, and we had talked about joining the Peace Corps together. But Wyatt got things going first. He quits his job. He signs up for the Peace Corps, and within a few months, was headed off to Zambia. He called me to see him all often. We sat there and sat there and sat there,

sort of avoiding the fact that he was going to actually have to leave. Finally, he was like, all right, you need to go home. I need to get on a plane. So he walked me to my car and gave me a big hug. And he said, yeah, he said, you've been a great friend of me, Donald. I said, yeah, you too. And he said, don't worry.

I'll be back in two years. Nobody's going to die. But 10 weeks into the trip, Wyatt was hanging out with some friends on the fourth floor of a hotel, and he leaned back against a window, almost floor to ceiling, and the plate glass gave out. He fell four stories, and he bled to death. His lungs filled with blood.

He never regained consciousness. When the Peace Corps called it, I just said, I don't believe it. Who is this? What kind of a sick thing are you doing? This is Jeannie Amin, Wyatt's mom. He said, fatal injuries. I said, what do you mean fatal?

What does fatal mean? My mind would not comprehend what that word meant. I felt so betrayed by God. I prayed for Wyatt and had felt that God would keep him safe. And, you know, it's such a crock. So two years go by. And right at the time that Wyatt would have been returning from the Peace Corps, something happened. Jeannie, can you tell me about getting the letter?

Yeah. I remember so clearly Greg and I were both home, and we went to the mailbox and walked to the kitchen, and we ripped open the envelope. And inside was a letter from Wyatt. We were really unsure what was going on. It's hard to describe. It was really incredible. So what happened is this.

Before Wyatt died, he had been playing around on the Internet, and he went to this site called Future Me, a website where you can send a letter to your future self. Wyatt wrote his right before he joined the Peace Corps, and the idea was that the site would hold on to it and email it back to him in two years. But of course, Wyatt wasn't there to get the letter. But Donald, his friend, found it, and sent it to Jeannie.

Greg and I both stood there at the counter and we read the letter. Okay. So what did it say? Dear future me, I'm leaving D.C. So far, I've managed to do pretty much everything other than what I needed to do. You know, it's about the fact that he's leaving for Zambia, first of all. I have no idea what to expect. He talks about his ex-girlfriend.

Sometimes love is like crack. How he hates his office job. I truly believe that I was meant to be a semi-transient being. You know, he's sort of being a little melodramatic. I want the Sistine Chapel, not a ranch-difference. home in the suburbs. That letter really captured who why it was. My life is my canvas. You know, with all his ramblings and these grandiose things.

He's already schizophrenically, colorful, intricate, indissingly amorphous. He knows that he's saying too much and that he kind of has to humble himself. How pretentious is that? And that's what he was like. He was always keeping a check on himself. One thing's for sure. I'm capable of rambling on and on and on and on and on and on. I have the same problem. I just remember feeling

I felt like Wyatt had just sent us a letter Greg shook his head and he said that kid you know and it was like a part of him was still alive Emily Let me just interrupt for just a second Okay

Because it would be easy to hear this story is just like a fluke Like a letter shows up from a kid who died And look what it means to the mom and his friend But no, this might be where we're all headed. Because the internet, you know, it's always on. And one of the things that's happening is that there are sites that are popping up that allow people to speak from beyond the grave

and to keep on speaking. In fact, David Eagleman, who we heard from earlier, the guy who read those stories and the neuroscientist, he started one. So I started the company, DeathSwitch.com. This is a real thing. There are hundreds of subscribers, yeah. No kidding. Oh, yeah.

The way it works is you sign up for the site, and then you keep checking in with the site to prove you're alive. And if you disappear for too long? The computer deduces you are dead. And then it sends out all those emails that you told it to. To your company, telling them what the passwords are, to your family, telling them where the gold is buried, or even just to remind them that you love them.

And he says that these switches, these death switches, are going off all the time. But lots of people test the death switches to make sure that it works. So they might not be real yet, but they will be pretty soon. So it's easy for him to imagine a letter like this. Happy 87th birthday. It's been 22 years since my death. I hope your life is proceeding delightfully.

Which may sound funny, but imagine that that's you in the kitchen. Getting a letter from your mom. Or from someone that you lost too early. How would you feel? It was like a part of him was still alive. So after Jeannie gets the letter, what happens? Well, Jeannie starts writing Wyatt as if he hadn't died. What do you mean?

writing him where? Well, Wyatt had been a huge blogger. And Jeannie discovered that a lot of his blogs were still active. One of them was even updating his age. It shows his age is what he'd be now. You know, it doesn't know that he's not here anymore. So she goes on and leaves him comments. My latest one was on November 5th this year. You want me to read that one? That'd be great. Wyatt, it feels like you are still here living in Zambia and it is 2005. I feel frantic to do something to stop the 17th from happening. In your mind when you comment on a blog. Oh, Wyatt, another a day without you. Where do you picture that it's going? Well, I think...

I wish you could just let me know what it is like and how you feel now. I think I just figure it's like on a screen and somehow he's getting it. Why, it's dead. For Donald, getting the letter was just a reminder of that. Why died in Zambia? And in fact, the idea

that technology could keep him around... I guess I'm sort of... That just didn't work for Donald. I sort of feel the way I imagine why it felt in his letter he talks about not being static. I want to learn and grow and see how others... I want to continue moving and seeking and building and growing.

I will not rest. It can be kind of frustrating. Like he's stuck in the 24-year-old Wyatt... Before White died, we had... We decided we were Luddites. We were anti-technology. And the hilarious part is that Wilde didn't Google Luddite to find out things about Luddites.

But initially the plan was to leave to meet Wyatt in Africa. And when Wyatt died, I knew that I still needed to make that break. So he did. I left my office job to go live on a small island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay. It's a 240-acre island, and I live there with three other people. There's no cell phone service. You won't be logging onto the internet.

He's sure Wyatt would have left it there. And 11. Goodbye. Here's Peter Ward, a paleontologist, and professor of biology and Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. In seven billion years, our son will suddenly go red giants. And the Earth is just burned to a crisp. Does that happen like one morning, or does that happen over several hundred years?

It actually takes a few thousand years, but the oceans will have been actually long gone. The oceans are going away. in 2 billion years. Oh, dear. Because the sun, that nasty old sun, just keeps getting brighter and brighter and brighter.

And about 50 to 60 centigrade, we start rapidly losing the ocean in space. This is the opposite of Noah's flood. Instead of the gas descending into the giant oceans, now the oceans pick up and go back into the sky. Exactly. And then things get worse from there because five billion years after the oceans are gone,

the sun starts to expand. that it happens in pulses. There are actually four to five pulses that are going to take place. The first four pulses will not eat up the Earth, but it will certainly sterilize it. The whole surface will melt. It will be glowing. The last one, the sun just keeps expanding.

Our sun will expand almost to the orbit of Mars. And so the Earth is totally gone. I mean, it just gets snubbed out. up down. But the nice thing is that Europa will become the new Maui. Oh, really? Yes, Jovean satellites. If you buy real estate there now, and I hear it's jerk sheep. That will be the tropics. Jovian moons. Jovian moons. How many are candidates for Maui's? There's Europa and Ganymede and Io, not so much. But isn't Europa, when the ice melts on Europa, isn't it an all-watery? It's just an, isn't it an all-watery? It's just could be a nice

warm ocean. Would just be a ball of water? Ball of water. A hundred mile deep water too at that. That's regular liquid water H2O? Yes. Oh, it's beautiful stuff. Think of the view. Think of the views of Jupiter. That would be so spectacular. The downside with these Jovian moons is that you couldn't breathe there. What, you left that out? Minor detail. You can't breathe it.

But I mean that you can certainly go water skiing. It's just have a little respirator on. Oh, that was a small little asterisk. Oh, come on now. Just compared to the end of the world, that's minor detail. I see. All right. So now let's go further out.

At what point does any possibility of solar system existence end? That one's tougher. That one's very tough because after the Red Giant, we become a M-class or a dwarf. Which means the sun after being this big, now expanding red star, giant, sinks back into itself and becomes much, much, much smaller and much, much cooler. So Europa, our little paradise, now freezes. Exactly. And then the only thing left is things like Voyager, things that you sent off that are still going off somewhere.

Bits of us. They're going and going and gone, and the chance that they'll ever intersect a star is very small. The end. the end. Now the final end, of course, is way often in the future, because the universe keeps expanding, that means eventually atoms themselves get pulled apart. Little protons and neutrons, they get ripped away from one another, and we're somewhere else, something else, somehow else. Yeah, and then everything that is, isn't. Exactly.

Go ahead. Oh. Goodbye. Oh, goodbye. Goodbye, Proton. Goodbye, neutron. Goodbye, Robert Krohich. Goodbye, Jada Boomrod.

Goodbye, everyone. Hello, this is John Troyer from the Center for Death and Society. Radio Lab is produced by Lulu Miller and Jada Boerad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Thorne Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, and Amanda Eran Sick. With help from Jessica Benko, Katie Sewell, Charles Choi. Emma Jacobs. and Ikes-Riskondaraja. Special thanks to Jeffrey Tambor, Richard Hake, Rekstone, and

Vicki Merrick, Fran Ayles, and Elizabeth Shore. I will see you all on the other side.