Cheating Death

SPEAKER_15: Radio Lab is supported by Turbo Tax. Turbo Tax experts make all your moves count, filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund guaranteed. So whether you started a podcast, side hustled your way to concert tickets or sold Hollywood memorabilia, switch to Turbo Tax and make your moves count. See guaranteed details at TurboTax.com slash guarantees. Experts only available with Turbo Tax Live. Heads up, today's show does include a couple of curse words. So anyway, here we go. SPEAKER_08: Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. SPEAKER_11: Radio Lab. From. WNYC. C. C? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Are you there? Hello. SPEAKER_09: Hey, hi. This is Radio Lab. I'm Latif Nasser. And today, um, a desperate, crazy, possibly futile, definitely foolhardy soul searching journey from our producer, Maria Paz-Gutierrez. Okay. So Latif, have you seen a movie called The Seventh Seal? SPEAKER_09: Oh, that's the Ingmar Bergman movie from like the, I don't know, 50s. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: I think I fell asleep during that movie, if I'm being honest. SPEAKER_03: Okay, fair. But presumably you made it through the opening? SPEAKER_08: I think so? SPEAKER_02: So just to jog your memory, the film begins with this scene of this knight who's just landed on a beach after spending years abroad fighting this brutal bloody war in the Middle East, the Crusades. All right. SPEAKER_02: And he looks at, he has the face of someone who's seen countless friends die. SPEAKER_05: Right. SPEAKER_02: Has himself narrowly avoided death multiple times. Right. SPEAKER_02: And he's finally made it back to the shores of his homeland. He's packing up his stuff when he looks up. SPEAKER_02: And he sees this figure, tall and pale and dressed in black from head to toe, who is, SPEAKER_02: of course, death. And death is just like, are you ready? SPEAKER_02: And in that moment, as death inches towards our knight to take his life, our guy, our knight, he stands up, he looks at death right in the eye and says, Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. SPEAKER_14: What if we play a game of chess? SPEAKER_02: Chess? SPEAKER_09: Yeah, a game of chess. SPEAKER_02: If I win, you spare my life. And if I lose, you do your thing. And death is like, yeah, let's do this. SPEAKER_02: So the rest of the movie is basically just this game in between moves, our knight, he goes home, he sees his wife again, he's eking out the last bits of whatever life has to offer before the end. SPEAKER_08: I take it he loses the chess game. Of course he does. SPEAKER_08: And why are you telling me any of this? SPEAKER_02: Seeing this knight just reminded me that I'm going to die one day. I've always thought about death. SPEAKER_02: My dad died when I was a year old. And so from a young age, I always had this sense that life, it can be cut short at any moment. And my whole life, I've been trying to make sense of why it is that we're given this thing to have it just kind of be taken away. SPEAKER_02: So for me, when I saw this knight, maybe it seems pointless, but I was just like, that's this. It felt like this beautiful, compelling act of resistance. And it made me think, I want to do that. What? I want to challenge death. So that is what we're going to do today here. I am challenging death to a chess match of sorts. A duel, you could say. SPEAKER_02: To the death. SPEAKER_03: So obviously death was not available. SPEAKER_02: Too busy ending lives left and right. SPEAKER_02: So I called a team of people who could stand in for death or play on death's behalf. SPEAKER_02: Couple of ecologists. We're all going to die. SPEAKER_07: An evolutionary biologist. SPEAKER_02: Death is inevitable. SPEAKER_07: An astrophysicist. SPEAKER_02: Death is just simply part of being a human. And an anthropologist. Everything dies. SPEAKER_09: Okay, so why have we assembled all these very morbid people together? SPEAKER_02: All these scientists, they know death, they know how it works. And so I just asked them. If I was to play a game of chess with death, if I could do my version of that chess match from the movie, what would death's moves be? How would death come for me? And my thought is, maybe there's a move that I can make to outwit and basically beat death. Okay, all right. SPEAKER_09: Okay, I think I know how this is going to go, but let's do it. SPEAKER_02: Hell yeah. So death's first move, courtesy of evolutionary bio-gerontologist Steven Ostad, ecologist SPEAKER_02: Roberto Salguero Gomes, and anthropologist Gabriela Contrides is basically, you know, SPEAKER_17: when you wake up and you leave your house, you might get hit by a car. SPEAKER_02: It happens. SPEAKER_07: You could be run by a bus. God forbid. You could have a safe fall on your head. Or you could be killed by a cold snap, by heavy storm. Any stochasticity in your life. And then you're gone. SPEAKER_17: And the longer you live, the more chance there is of something awful happening to you. Because that's how life works. SPEAKER_02: All these accidents, they're death's little minions. They're kind of just like waiting for us to, waiting for me to slip and fall so that I can eventually meet my maker. I love how you slip between the us and the me. SPEAKER_02: You're gonna die with me, Lotte. SPEAKER_02: So my first move in the game is like, that's fine. I can be careful. I can just stay home. I can use a water purifier. SPEAKER_09: Employ a food taste tester in case there's any poisons that happen to fall into your food. I can just wear a helmet. SPEAKER_09: Wear ten helmets. You can wear like a, like styrofoam padding just like around your body at all times. SPEAKER_02: Even random things like earthquakes. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: I downloaded an app that will give me two minutes to leave the building in case everything is collapsing around me. SPEAKER_09: You're gonna make sure your phone never runs out of battery, I guess? Or... SPEAKER_02: I got a backup. SPEAKER_09: Okay, you got it. Okay. SPEAKER_17: Great. But, um... SPEAKER_02: Of course. My experts told me that even if I bubble wrap myself, instead of my apartment watching my earthquake app, that doesn't protect me from... SPEAKER_17: Disease. SPEAKER_17: We can get influenza. We could get diabetes. We could get asthma. SPEAKER_02: Diseases that might just kill me outright or... Kidney failure, cancer, or heart disease. SPEAKER_02: Might just set me up for death's next move, which is... Wear and tear. To play the long game. SPEAKER_06: You deteriorate as you get older, right? Yeah. Let me give you an example. Do you own a car? SPEAKER_02: I own a car. SPEAKER_06: Awesome. Can I ask you how old is your car? SPEAKER_02: 2015. SPEAKER_06: 2015. So get in there, right? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_06: You know, with time there'll be some things that you need to take it back to the car workshop for to fix. SPEAKER_07: Because parts wear out. For instance, the heart, it's a muscle, you know, muscles eventually wear out. SPEAKER_02: One of those essential organs gives out. SPEAKER_09: Your dead. People have heart transplants, people have kidney transplants. Who cares? SPEAKER_02: Yes, indeed. That's what I was saying. You are on my side. Welcome. Welcome to the dark side. Yeah. Okay. Let's just do some transplants. SPEAKER_06: You could, you could in theory replace parts, but if you allow me the biological analogy, there'll be some organs within the car that once they fail, you'll be like, you know what, I'm done and that's the way this car. For instance, our brains. SPEAKER_07: I mean maybe parts of it. Okay. But if you lost your memory, would you be the same person? SPEAKER_09: This all of a sudden got a lot less abstract. Right. Okay. Yeah, I guess? SPEAKER_05: Not? SPEAKER_07: I don't know. I'm not sure. I don't want to sound too negative about this, but at some point that starts to go even in the healthiest among us. You know, it's, I think of it like bending a tree branch. If it'll bend, it'll bend, it'll bend, and finally it breaks. And that's what happens with aging. Okay. SPEAKER_09: How long are you going to buttress this tree branch? What are you going to do against aging? SPEAKER_02: Well, look, today we live way longer than we have ever before, in part because we eat better and have modern medicine. And so I'm just going to dial in the perfect lifestyle. SPEAKER_02: Like what if I just eat an absurd amount of vegetables and fruits? SPEAKER_09: Only super foods. Eat avocados and bran flakes for every meal. SPEAKER_02: I'm definitely drinking plenty of water. Great, right? SPEAKER_09: And no smoking. You cannot smoke. SPEAKER_17: Not smoking is a good start, but it's still not going to stop you from dying. Yeah, no, Maripa. SPEAKER_06: Aging. SPEAKER_02: Everyone told me that trying to fight off aging with diet or vitamins is just not going to cut it. There are literally hundreds of theories about why we age, and they involve all these different things that I barely understand, but whatever. I'm going to name off. SPEAKER_05: They include genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of SPEAKER_02: proteostasis, deregulated nutrients, I'm saying mitochondrial dysfunction. SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, okay. SPEAKER_09: I have no idea what you're talking about. No, no, no, there's more. SPEAKER_02: Cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion. I got it. SPEAKER_09: You're also exhausted, and it sounds like what you're saying is like, bran flakes are not going to hit any of these things. Yeah, I mean, the point is, aging, it's like a house of cards, or the most intricate domino SPEAKER_02: line thing. And to this day, scientists haven't been able to pin down exactly why we age, but what they do know is aging happens down at the most fundamental level of all living things. SPEAKER_07: Yes. It all boils down to what's going on inside your cells. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, like literally just by existing, your cells are getting damaged. SPEAKER_02: In particular, I learned that the thing that's being damaged is the DNA inside your cells. SPEAKER_17: Your genetic material, your essence. SPEAKER_02: That little coil of molecules that tells your cells what to do. The information of you. SPEAKER_07: The DNA is being damaged 10,000 or more times a day. SPEAKER_09: Right now? SPEAKER_09: Right now. Okay, great. SPEAKER_02: So great. You just walk outside on any given morning. You are exposed to sunlight. UV radiation. You know that UV starts to damage your cells. That's damaging the DNA in your skin cells. SPEAKER_08: Great. SPEAKER_02: Or just take a breath. Pollution. Little bits of random stuff in the air damages the DNA inside our lung cells. Exactly, exactly. SPEAKER_07: So you're under this vast assault. SPEAKER_02: But that seems beatable. What? SPEAKER_09: No, it really doesn't. It really does not sound beatable. Yes! SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'll just take my helmet and my good diet and my vitamins and I'll move to somewhere with clean mountain air. Like some remote part of the world. I'll move to Antarctica. Okay. SPEAKER_02: And then I'll find a cave to keep out of the sun. No, I... And then I'll just live there safe. SPEAKER_08: Perfect plan. I thought so. SPEAKER_17: No. Still, unfortunately, you have to keep eating to stay alive. SPEAKER_02: So, eating, my experts tell me, down at the cell level. SPEAKER_07: That's really just a fire. A fire inside us? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_07: Just like a fire. SPEAKER_02: Like, take a campfire. That is just oxygen having a chemical reaction with the wood. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, right. SPEAKER_02: And inside each and every single one of our cells, we're combining... Oxygen and carbohydrates, basically, to get energy. SPEAKER_07: But just like fire has side effects like smoke and sparks and all, our metabolism, that's damaging our cells. SPEAKER_02: And damaging the DNA. The essence of you. SPEAKER_07: You know, I'm not happy about that, but it's a fact. SPEAKER_02: So the way Gabriela and Steven laid it out for me is that the instructions for the cells over time become jankier and jankier. So our cells, over time, become more and more messed up, which then messes up our organs. Every part of us. It all begins to fall apart. SPEAKER_07: Ultimately that does us in. And so, well, I can't really remember where we're going with this, but yeah, you have SPEAKER_17: to eat. By the way, do you have any questions? SPEAKER_09: No, no. I mean, just one thing that I feel like I noticed, the idea that the sun is like the source of all our energy that we need to survive and then yet literally damages us. And then eating is the way that we get that energy into our system. And that actually is damaging us too while we're doing that. It's like, this feels like a kind of a... SPEAKER_02: Well, we're not done yet. SPEAKER_02: I mean, maybe you are, but I'm not, because as I was researching the DNA damage stuff, I discovered that there are parts of the DNA and parts of the cell that are on my team. SPEAKER_09: Wait, like how so? SPEAKER_02: There are actually like these little enzymes that can go in and take a damaged part of your DNA and remove it and re-synthesize the original part to get it back to working the way it was before all the damage. SPEAKER_09: All right. So I was like, why can't the repair team just go in there and take care of all this damage SPEAKER_02: from the sun and the air and whatever? SPEAKER_07: Yeah, well, there's really no way that we can fix all of that damage with 100% fidelity. SPEAKER_17: Like think of a jumper, right? You've got like a knitted jumper and it's perfect. Bear with me on this one. Maybe you like catch it on a branch, right? And like one piece of thread becomes unraveled a little bit, but that's okay because you know how to sew. So that's yourselves repairing themselves. You've just repaired like an issue. Great. But then, you know, you accidentally walk through a really thorny bush and now you've got like 10 threads that have been pulled out and actually each of those threads is connected to more threads and now you've got holes and maybe they do get repaired, but just not quick enough. So by the time one hole is patched up, there's already another one. And now you've got this kind of jumper that's a big mix of like holes and repaired pieces. And eventually your jumper is like not a jumper anymore. It just stops working as a jumper. SPEAKER_17: So you die. SPEAKER_02: And at this point, that's when I realized that our bodies, that my body is not even on my team, is actually on Death's team. Because as we get older, the body takes the energy away from the repair processes. SPEAKER_07: And when you do that, of course, things don't get repaired. SPEAKER_02: Believe it or not, Stephen says in an evolutionary sense, this whole decaying, deteriorating, dying thing was the plan all along. SPEAKER_07: You know, the way our bodies are built now is a consequence of human evolution in an environment that for most of that time was very, very different. SPEAKER_02: Without sanitation or modern medicine, people didn't even make it into old age. SPEAKER_07: You know, 300,000 years ago, most people were dead by the time they were 60. A lion would get us, there would be a drought, there would be a fire. We'd eat some food that was tainted. Good times. The glory days. Yeah, pretty much. And if that is the case, then from an evolutionary standpoint, the idea is to reproduce before the inevitable accident happens to you. SPEAKER_02: So Stephen says, you put less energy into fixing the damage in your body, and you put it towards reproduction. And of course, if you allocate all of your resources to reproduction, you've got none SPEAKER_06: left for you. SPEAKER_17: And that's why it's really important that we don't confuse, like being evolutionarily successful with health. Evolution doesn't care if you are healthy. It cares if you are healthy enough to reproduce. SPEAKER_02: At that point, how are you feeling, Latif? Well, just like there's conflicting priorities here in the design. SPEAKER_09: It's like this thing everybody and me as well gets pissed about, like phones. It's like planned obsolescence. Like they make the thing so that it will break, so that you'll buy a new one. SPEAKER_09: That's the capitalism version, but the evolution version is like, clear this thing out of the way, so there's room for the new models. SPEAKER_07: Yes. I mean, people are variable. We all have different inheritance of genes. We all survive in different environments. But a hundred years is about as long as we can last, given the way our current body is built. SPEAKER_09: I mean, Maria, pause, like from the accidents to the eating and the fire inside and the air you're breathing and the DNA damage and like even evolution is against you here. This feels like a checkmate to me. SPEAKER_02: Fine. I mean, sure, it's a checkmate for you and me, but I am here on behalf of humanity, Latif, including your children. My children? SPEAKER_09: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Maybe future generations don't have to put up with any of this. Maybe they don't have to die. SPEAKER_09: I mean, I think my kids are fine, MPG. Well, tell you what, we're going to take a break now. SPEAKER_02: So you have some time to go talk to them and you can ask them, do you want to die? But either way, get ready, because when we come back, we are going to play this game to the end of everything. SPEAKER_08: That'll be great. SPEAKER_15: OK. Radiolab is supported by BetterHelp. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online and designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Become your own soulmate, whether you're looking for one or not. Visit betterhelp.com slash radiolab today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash radiolab. Radiolab is supported by TurboTax. TurboTax experts make all your moves count, filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund guaranteed. So whether you started a podcast, side hustled your way to concert tickets or sold Hollywood memorabilia, switch to TurboTax and make your moves count. See guaranteed details at TurboTax dot com slash guarantees. Experts only available with TurboTax Live. SPEAKER_14: Of all the people living with HIV in the United States today, 40% of them are black. It's an imbalance that developed right at the start. SPEAKER_01: The first issue that we had was the resistance of the black clergy to get involved because two thirds of them thought it's a sin and that's what happens to sinners. SPEAKER_14: Find out how that changed this week on Blindspot, the plague in the shadows. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_09: Latif, Radiolab here today with Maria Paz-Gutierrez on her increasingly quixotic effort to outdo the one absolute truth of all human existence and all life, which is of course death. Yup, that's me. SPEAKER_09: And before the break, you were going to take the game, I don't know, into the future to see if you can win on behalf of my children and or all future generations. SPEAKER_02: Right. So a quick recap might help. Remember how our death experts told us that evolution was like, I don't care if your DNA gets all damaged and you die because I just want you to have babies. Yeah, that was sobering. SPEAKER_02: Well, those babies get their fresh start in part because the body has a kind of trump card cell. The stem cell. The stem cell. A stem cell is a cell in your body that has DNA, the instructions for making and being you that has been, in a sense, protected from the damage of living life. It hasn't made any copies of itself. Some stem cells have the potential to become a fresh version of basically any other cell in your body. A liver cell, a skin cell, a toe cell, an eyeball cell, whatever. SPEAKER_09: Love me some stem cells. How about this? SPEAKER_04: New at six, a breakthrough in reversing the signs of aging. Researchers say that... SPEAKER_02: So in just the last several years, scientists have started to figure out how to use stem cells Scientists have rejuvenated the skin cells taken from a 53-year-old woman. SPEAKER_00: To replace cells that have been damaged or even turn regular old cells back into stem SPEAKER_02: cells. SPEAKER_08: Really? SPEAKER_08: Yeah. To your point, I mean, it sounds like science fiction. I mean, he's taking these... SPEAKER_02: We're restoring vision and we don't know where this is going, but by 2050, we're going SPEAKER_11: to be able to restore a lot of things that get damaged. But there are some big name labs working on this stuff for humans and they're being backed SPEAKER_02: by big money. Jeff Bezos is spending billions... SPEAKER_11: The Amazon founder reportedly made a significant investment in a company called Altos Labs. SPEAKER_02: So eventually this could be a way to beat the whole DNA cell damage thing that seems to be at the root of aging. SPEAKER_01: It's going to happen. It's like asking the Wright brothers, are we going to fly? Well, of course we are. It's just a question of when. SPEAKER_09: But I mean, like, isn't this one of those things where someone's always saying this is 20 years away and 20 years away and it's always 20 years away and then it never happens? Yeah, sure. SPEAKER_02: Maybe. I mean, I don't know. But what I do know is that I'm on team maybe, maybe one day. And just to make this maybe a little bit more concrete, I will say that there are animals in the natural world already out there that do this kind of thing. Really? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. You ever hear of the immortal jellyfish? SPEAKER_09: No. SPEAKER_02: Oh my God. I figured you would. This is a bit shocking. Okay. SPEAKER_09: All right. SPEAKER_02: Okay. Tell me, tell me, tell me. So the immortal jellyfish is this tiny little jellyfish. It's like the size of your pinky nail tiny. It's translucent, has these like tiny little tentacles. SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_02: It's so cute. Um, it's originally from the Mediterranean, but has since spread all over. It's a bit of an invasive species. I mean, that's what I've read. Anyway. If you're immortal, it feels like that's inevitable. SPEAKER_09: Anyway, keep going. SPEAKER_02: And this jellyfish can have baby jellyfish like a normal sea creature would. But also it's different because when it experiences stress, it can trigger this developmental trick. SPEAKER_01: If you try to kill it, it does not die. SPEAKER_02: The cells in its body can revert back to the baby versions of themselves. And then this clump of polyps just grows back into being a new jellyfish that's genetically identical to its original self. SPEAKER_09: It's funny, like the image I have when you describe that is like sneaking up on like a 90 year old and scaring them from behind. And then they turn into a baby. SPEAKER_02: That's pretty much a superpower. I love that. SPEAKER_09: That's amazing. And it can just do that. Can you just do that over and over as many times as it wants? SPEAKER_02: So they haven't actually studied the jellyfish for long enough to know how many times it can pull the trick. Maybe not forever. And before anyone tries to jump in and destroy my hope, I am aware that, of course, the immortal SPEAKER_02: jellyfish could always just get eaten by a turtle or crushed by a rock. But still, this jellyfish does feel like a glimmer of hope. Like there could be some kind of genetic loophole to fight back against the DNA and the cell wear and tear. Like... SPEAKER_09: Fingernail sized loophole here. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Why can't we just be the jellyfish? SPEAKER_12: You want to be a mortal jellyfish? Cool. Awesome. I hope you get reincarnated as an immortal jellyfish. So then that way you can live for a long time and have no recollection of that life before. SPEAKER_02: This is Krischel. He's an urban ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. SPEAKER_12: If you would like to do that, that's cool. SPEAKER_02: His point is, if you're constantly trying to revert back to the baby blobby version of yourself, it's not like you'd be able to take your memories with you. So at that point, it wouldn't even be clear in what sense you would even be you. SPEAKER_12: It feels like you're just a clone or a facsimile of what you used to be. And I don't think most human beings would opt into that life. SPEAKER_02: When talking to Krisc, kind of flipped this whole little game I've been playing on its head. SPEAKER_12: Let's be blunt. This equation for life includes death. SPEAKER_02: Including what it would even mean for me to win. SPEAKER_12: Let's play this out. So starting now, everything from here on out is immortal. All of the things in your world that currently exist cannot die. Death is off the table, right? SPEAKER_12: There are a bunch of folks cheering and being like, I'm never going to die. Okay, cool. Now think about the ways in which individual animals or people or plants or bacteria or whatever is living dies. SPEAKER_02: Take cicadas. They explode into these huge swarms and then after some singing and some sex, they die. And there on the ground are the shells they've left behind. SPEAKER_12: Nutrients that can be repurposed and shifted as energy for other organisms. SPEAKER_02: Which helps the forest grow. And that's just one bug. You know, there's scavengers and mushrooms and mice and people, all of them, a whole ecosystem that's either feeding off death or dying and becoming food for something else. SPEAKER_12: But in this reality, in this reality, nothing's dying anymore. That means that that energy, it's gone. So if we're not getting new energy for new things to grow, we may be at stasis, y'all. That means potentially no new babies, no new life, no change in that system. Because if everything is immortal, then why would you end up having selection for certain traits to allow for those organisms to be better suited for the environment? Why does it matter? They're not going to die anyway. SPEAKER_02: Chris has in a world where nothing dies. SPEAKER_12: Life essentially halts at a standstill. And yeah, everything is alive to exist in this new reality, but it doesn't change. It doesn't morph. It doesn't evolve. It isn't dynamic. The extravagant, extraordinary biomes that we currently have that exist on this planet, they all stop. SPEAKER_02: It would be as if we were living in a photograph of the world as we know it, just frozen in time. SPEAKER_12: Living in a world like that gets really boring really quickly to the point where, why did we want to have immortality in the first place when the world that we envisioned having immortality in no longer exists? SPEAKER_09: I don't think I want to win this game anymore. This sounds, this sounds worse than death, actually. SPEAKER_02: I don't know. SPEAKER_09: Really? You would, you would, you would take the frozen photograph? SPEAKER_02: Well, it's just that in the face of death, like in the face of a moment where the life of someone you love has suddenly been taken from you, or even just like having to face the moment where your own life, where all the things that you've done and dreamed and schemed and built might just blink out of existence. In the face of that, I might honestly consider the comfort of being able to live in a photograph. SPEAKER_09: But it's frozen. It's a plateau. Like you'll never, everything will be so mundane and same that it'll be like we're all just going to be on cruise control forever and there won't be any highs or lows or like there won't be any, like for me, I don't know, that doesn't, doesn't feel like life. SPEAKER_13: It's the change that's really important to being alive. SPEAKER_02: So this is Jana Levin. She's an astrophysicist and she happens to subscribe to your point of view. SPEAKER_13: Right now in talking to you, my thoughts are changing and I'm experiencing that and I'm watching the passage of time by a clock changing. SPEAKER_02: And when I told Jana about my game, this match that I'm playing against death, she pretty much immediately hit me with what felt like the ultimate move. Because according to her, eventually the entire universe probably has to die. SPEAKER_02: This march towards death is a physical law of the universe. SPEAKER_13: And that idea comes from the second law of thermodynamics. SPEAKER_02: So what you need to understand is that the most fundamental fact about living things is that they are orderly arrangements of stuff. We're born in some sense in an extremely ordered state. SPEAKER_02: Each part of us is in its place interacting with other parts in very orderly ways. I wake up, I think things. SPEAKER_13: I know who I am. That's a very ordered state. I have, I look a particular way. I don't look wildly different tomorrow. My face isn't scrambled. That's what it means to be me, to be alive. SPEAKER_02: The problem, Jana says, is the second law of thermodynamics. SPEAKER_02: Which says that in general, over time, things get more and more disorderly. SPEAKER_13: On average, entropy, which is a measure of disorder, will always increase. Things will always tend to get more disordered. SPEAKER_02: And Jana says that this move toward disorder or decay or deterioration is just a basic fact of the passage of time. Like you can literally see it. SPEAKER_13: If you look at a flower and you watch a movie where a rotten flower lifts itself back up, becomes incredibly perfect again instead of little pieces on the ground, you know you're watching that backwards. SPEAKER_02: Like the felt experience of time, that just is decay, deterioration, death. SPEAKER_09: But we can make things more orderly. We can fix things that are broken. Like every day, new orderly little living things are born. SPEAKER_02: Right. But creating that life for that order, it requires work. All living things on Earth, if you trace it back, they get their energy to live and grow and make new life from the sun, right? SPEAKER_02: But if you zoom out, you'll notice that overall, disorder is still increasing. Like sure, you created something orderly here on Earth, but all the while the sun is burning up its fuel. All of its light and heat and energy is spewing out across the solar system, spreading out further and further. SPEAKER_13: And the sun will eventually run out of thermonuclear fuel and it will kind of cool and turn redder and distend and bloat out and vaporize the inner planets. Do we have a timeline for when the sun is going to die? SPEAKER_13: It's a few billion years. SPEAKER_08: Okay. Plenty of time. SPEAKER_13: But eventually, even if we found some way to travel near the speed of light to another star system and find another planet and set up colonies or whatever we could do, we could cop-skip around the galaxy trying to keep going. It doesn't matter. SPEAKER_02: Those new planets, those new stars will eventually burn out too until... SPEAKER_13: There are no more galaxies, no more black holes, no more stars, no more people, no more planets, nothing ordered. Just random motions of particles, but they're all so far apart that they can't even notice each other. That is a universe which cannot experience change and where there cannot be things like thoughts. And there cannot be creatures with minds that have thoughts. In some sense, the universe has gotten so cold that it's effectively, it's effectively died. SPEAKER_09: Okay, that's your checkmate. That's the final checkmate. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, it feels that way. SPEAKER_09: It sounds like you need a drink right now. I need so much in my life. SPEAKER_02: I am empty. But can I make a confession? Sure. SPEAKER_02: Um, I figured I'd lose. But you know how the knight from the seventh seal is playing chess against death, but really he's just buying himself time so that he can go home and see his wife? SPEAKER_08: Right, right. SPEAKER_02: This whole time, I was hoping not so much that I would win, although that would have been nice, but truly I was just hoping I'd be able to find a satisfying answer to the question of why? Why do we die? Or like, why do we have to die? SPEAKER_06: Why do we die? I'm just saying you're talking about death today. I just lost both my grandparents. SPEAKER_13: One after another. SPEAKER_02: And as I was reporting out this story, I asked philosophers, musicians, friends, and even people on the street. SPEAKER_14: SPEAKER_14: Why do we die? That's a very common question to ask when you're in the kind of existential crisis you're SPEAKER_01: having. SPEAKER_01: I think we die because... Because it's hard to exist forever. SPEAKER_16: Because we have to. SPEAKER_04: Because of our life. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. I mean, what's the alternative? SPEAKER_04: We get old, we get tired, and we wither away. Everybody. There's no way out of this. SPEAKER_18: And they said all kinds of different things. I could imagine myself dying of old age, like, after a big family meal where everyone's gathered and I ate way too many oysters and lobster and I drank champagne even though I'm like 98. And in the midst of my sleep, my body just gave up. Time to move on to the next. No more problems, no more worries. SPEAKER_05: Just peace forever. I mean, when is your time? SPEAKER_01: It's your time. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, everything has come to an end. SPEAKER_01: The good things, the bad things. SPEAKER_08: There's nothing you can do about that. I am surprised I'm alive today. I've never expected to live this long. I'm in the middle of a death right now. SPEAKER_02: But listening back. Why do I think we die? SPEAKER_01: That's a good question. That is a good question. SPEAKER_02: They're all saying the same thing. I have no fucking clue. SPEAKER_01: Why do you ask why all the time? Just you know, get on with it. You know, the why is the motherfucker. You will never figure it out. SPEAKER_03: Why? SPEAKER_12: Because it's not meant to be figured out. You just got to come to the understanding of what life is. And what is life? SPEAKER_12: Life is death. SPEAKER_06: And so do you understand why? SPEAKER_15: Do you kind of understand why we die? SPEAKER_18: No. Yeah, just something that happened? SPEAKER_18: Yes. SPEAKER_12: Maria, you asked this question knowing full well you weren't going to get a straight answer from anybody, right? I know you did. And even in this conversation, it's as if we are trying to put words that help us control our own understandings and conceptions of death. And really at the end of the day, death doesn't care. It does not care. It doesn't care if you understand the process of death or what it is or how important it is. It's going to happen regardless. Everyone will die. Honestly, life is the anomaly, right? SPEAKER_12: The majority of other planets in our solar system and in other solar systems across the vastness of the universe does not have life. We are the exception. We're not the rule. SPEAKER_05: Death is a neutral state, right? SPEAKER_12: Letting things be in nothingness is the neutral state. We are surrounded by a vast ocean of blackness. So just take solace in the fact that in the very small, very, very rare percentage of SPEAKER_12: life succeeding, we made it, y'all. We made the sweepstakes. Be happy that we made the sweepstakes. Might as well enjoy it while we got it. And eventually when the universe dies, who knows? It may be reborn in a different form with different function, with different rules. We just don't know. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Let's see. How can I say this? There is another possibility for immortality. We have to remember just like our star turned out not to be the only star, our planet turned out not to be the only planet, our galaxy turned out not to be the only galaxy, our universe might not be the only universe. We don't understand the laws of physics well enough yet to be able to confidently state if this is a fluke. SPEAKER_02: Like if a universe that includes life is a fluke. Or if it's the opposite, that it's plentiful. SPEAKER_13: Maybe there are other universes. They're disconnected from ours and have histories and futures that are disconnected from ours. We can't point to them in space or in time. But theoretically, if there's a multiverse, we're just one in a vast collection of other universes. And some of those universes will not be able to support life. But we can imagine that some will. SPEAKER_02: So potentially, even after our universe dies, SPEAKER_13: there is life out there. Even if it's not us. Life is plentiful in the multiverse. SPEAKER_02: It's like life never really wins the game against death, but death never really wins either. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. SPEAKER_05: This episode was reported by Maria Paz-Gutierrez and produced by Maria Paz with help from Alyssa SPEAKER_09: Jung Perry and Timmy Broderick. Sound and music from, once again, Maria Paz-Gutierrez, as well as Jeremy Blum. Mixing help from Arianne Wack. Special thanks to Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, Stephen Nadler, Beth Jaris, Anjana Badrinarayanan, Shaun Chakrabarty, Bob Horvitz, John K. Davis, Jessica Brand, Chandan K. Sen, Cole Impiri, Carl Bergstrom, Erin Gentry Lamb, and Jared Sylvia. This episode was made in loving memory of Dali Rodriguez. This is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasr. Thanks for listening. SPEAKER_16: Hi, I'm Hazel and I'm from Silver Spring. Radiolab was created by Chad Beaumont and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of Sound is Land. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bressler, Eketi Foster-Keece, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Pascutillas, Sindhu Nainesam Fadhan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krueger, and Natalie Middleton. Thank you. SPEAKER_10: Hi, I'm Ram from India. Leadership support for Radiolab. Science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignment Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SPEAKER_14: The history of HIV and AIDS is the history of people who were told to stay out of sight and who refused. Gay men, but also injection drug users, women, and yes, children who contracted the virus. Join us for the series, Blindspot, the plague in the shadows. How much pain could have been avoided had we paid attention sooner and what lessons could we have learned? From History Channel and WNYC Studios. Listen wherever you get podcasts.