HEAVENS ON EARTH
The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia
In 2014, Michael Shermer had a bizarre experience: An old radio from Germany that he had previously tried to fix and then abandoned while in the “on” position in a desk drawer suddenly started playing a love song. But it wasn’t just any radio or any moment. The radio had belonged to the long-dead grandfather of Shermer’s fiancée, Jennifer; and the day it chose to start playing was that of their wedding. Jennifer had been feeling homesick for her family back in the German town of Köln, and at just the right moment a beloved possession of a beloved relative offered what seemed like a blessing. Songs continued to emanate from the radio for the rest of the evening. The following day, the set went quiet, never again to regain its voice.
Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, recounts this incident in his latest book, “Heavens on Earth.” The discussion could have easily devolved into pseudoscientific speculation (was the radio a communication from beyond?) or, at the opposite end, an opportunity to deride anyone who might see it as such (how could anyone be silly enough to see this as anything other than timely coincidence?). Instead, the moment becomes a personal window into the book’s underlying theme: It is natural to want to read into the unexplainable and search for forces greater than ourselves — and yet, the more we want to believe, the more we need to enlist scientific inquiry on our side. Don’t dismiss outright stories that defy regular explanations, Shermer urges. Rather, “Embrace the mystery. What we do not need to do is fill in the explanatory gaps with gods or any such preternatural forces. We can’t explain everything, and it’s always O.K. to say ‘I don’t know’ and leave it at that until a natural explanation presents itself,” he writes.
Such is the central message in a wide-ranging examination of humanity’s quest for something beyond our temporary residence on Earth. Shermer begins with a simple notion: Humans are mortal, and yet it is near impossible to imagine our mortality. You cannot picture your death because you would no longer exist to experience it. This “inability to imagine our own nonexistence means that an ultimate understanding of our own mortality will forever elude us,” Shermer argues, and so we strive to subvert that mortality however we can.
At its most basic, the urge manifests in the failure to acknowledge that death is final. Even animals, Shermer notes, often refuse to give up their loved ones. Dolphins, for instance, have been known to push their dead to the surface in an apparent attempt to help them regain the ability to breathe. Aware that such efforts are bound to fail, humans resort to more spiritual means of resuscitation, often choosing to believe that while the body is dead the soul remains. And here is where religion, mankind’s primary search for immortality and the afterlife, enters the picture. This is the shortest and, to my mind, weakest section of an otherwise fascinating book. I admit I was a bit taken aback by Shermer’s cavalier dismissal of one of the most long-lasting quests for immortality of them all. Rather than explore the nuance of religious experience, he resorts to glib comments: in the case of Christianity, “Hell is not other people (as Jean-Paul Sartre famously opined in ‘No Exit’), but separation from God”; in the case of Islam, “Muslim scripture describes paradise as a garden that includes flowing water, along with milk, wine, honey, dates, pomegranates, and other earthly delights one might crave with no supermarkets in sight … Naturally there’s sex in paradise.” One wishes he would forgo the religious angle altogether and get straight to the more modern quests, where his exploration comes to life — and to scientific rigor.
Shermer’s journey into the present-day search for human domination over death and society’s ills introduces readers to all forms of what he calls “techno-optimism,” meaning the belief that technological progress means an end to death — or, at the very least, to aging and social decay. There are the cryonicists who want to freeze us, and those who want simply to freeze our brains, with all their neural connections and associated memories (the connectome). The transhumanists want to enhance us so thoroughly — through means both natural and artificial — that we become godlike, “taking control of evolution and transforming the species into something stronger, faster, sexier, healthier and with vastly superior cognitive abilities the likes of which we mere mortals cannot conceive”; the Omega Point theorists think we will all one day be brought back to life in a virtual reality. Believers in “the singularity” contend that it is possible to upload the human brain to a server without losing the essence of what makes you you. And, of course, there are those who try to cure us of aging, so that our bodies and minds will cease to deteriorate and our life spans will increase ad infinitum. Shermer visits each of these and other utopian theories with detail and considered analysis, drawing readers along increasingly unrealistic (or are they?) possibilities for our future evolution. It’s a journey as boggling as it is engrossing.
It is also one that, for now, ends up being purely speculative. As Shermer concludes after reviewing the current state of science, it seems that our present best hope for immortality lies in “eating well, exercising regularly and sleeping soundly” — a prosaic answer if there ever was one in the face of so much spiritual and technological brouhaha. However, while we are unlikely to achieve any of these lofty goals in the foreseeable future, Shermer brings us back to the lesson of that solitary radio: What we can do is “consider how mortal beings can find meaning in an apparently meaningless universe.” We ought to embrace awe, “the wonderment that comes from being humbled before something grander than oneself.” Awe, even in the face of the knowledge that immortality is currently — and perhaps forever — impossible: That seems to me a quest worth pursuing.
Source: www.nytimes.com
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