I am a theoretical physicist and retired Director of UCITE (University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. My latest book THE GREAT PARADOX OF SCIENCE: Why its conclusions can be relied upon even though they cannot be proven was published by Oxford University Press in December 2019. I am the author of three other books: God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom (2009), The Achievement Gap in US Education: Canaries in the Mine (2005), and Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs (2000).
You can email me at mano'"dot'"singham"'at"'case'"dot'"edu.
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A group of friends from my college days in Sri Lanka now live all over the world but we stay in touch via a monthly video conference call. Two months ago, during such a call two of them made a startling revelation. It was that while we were in college, three of us had gone on a holiday and stayed at the home of the uncle of one of them, who happened to be a physician. At one point he had taken my two friends aside and told them that because of my polio, I would not live to be much older than about forty years of age. My friends did not know what to do with this information but decided that they would not share it with me. It was only two months ago, some fifty years later, that they decided to tell me.
Needless to say, I was surprised but also amused that I had basically exceeded my shelf life by quite a long time.
But it also got me thinking. All of us know that we will die some time. But we live and make decisions for our future as if we are going to live forever, the exception being if we are given a diagnosis of having a terminal illness with a short time horizon. Then our decisions are determined by that knowledge.
I started to wonder about how my life decisions may have been affected if my friends had told me this back then and I had taken the forty-year lifespan prediction seriously. Would I have decided to not do anything that required a long-term commitment, such as getting married and having children? Would I have wondered whether it would be worthwhile pursuing a doctoral degree in physics, knowing that I would only have about ten years to work after getting it? Would I have become more hedonistic, seeking to extract as much pleasure as I could while I could? Would I have become more reckless and lived a life quite different from my current one in which I am pretty risk averse?
It is hard to look back on life and imagine what alternative paths one might have taken. I began to wonder how the world would be different if we knew by some means that we each had a definite lifespan and knew what it was, perhaps all the same lifespan for everyone (say because of an impending unavoidable global catastrophe) or different ones for each. How would our behavior change as we approached the end?
It reminded me of a film that I reviewed back in 2017, called The Brand New Testament (2015) that was based on this idea, and I give below some of that review.
The film’s premise is that God lives in Brussels in a dingy apartment with his wife, the Mother Goddess, and his ten year-old daughter Ea. God is a cranky, abusive, drunk who spends his days in a ratty bathrobe. He has terrorized his wife so much that she does not talk and spends her days cleaning, embroidering, poring over her baseball card collection, and waiting for the day when her son JC will return. But God tells her to forget about that last hope. He despises JC as a loser whom he sent into the world to spread his message of hate but JC went rogue and free-lanced about loving one another and then got himself killed. The key plot point is that only God has the key to a massive locked room that has the records of every person and has a computer connected to the internet. It is only through the computer that God can exercise his powers. Without it, he is just an ordinary person.
The family never goes outside and watch only sports on TV so the mother and daughter have no idea what God is up to. One day, he forgetfully leaves the computer room door unlocked and his daughter sneaks in and looks at the computer and is horrified to find out what he has been doing and confronts him about why he is causing so much suffering to people whom he does not even know. Enraged, he beats her with a belt. She gets revenge by stealing his computer room key while he sleeps. She finds a file that lists the exact time of death of everyone in the world and sends out text messages to all of them with that information, and also inserts a countdown clock on their phones that tells them the amount of time they have left. She then disables the computer and escapes from the apartment into the world. When God wakes up and finds out what she has done, he is furious because the lack of knowledge about their time of death is the chief means he had of keeping people in fear and he is upset that people now can’t be pushed around by him anymore.
All this happens in the first fifteen minutes or so of the film and the rest of the film is devoted to following the lives of the daughter, a homeless man she befriends and recruits to write a new testament to add to the Bible, and six people she has chosen as her own apostles as they decide what to do with the amount of time they have left before dying. Meanwhile God is trying to find his daughter to get her to fix the computer so that he can take control again.
The film is both funny and thought-provoking about how knowledge of when one will die changes the way that people view and live their lives.
If I knew how long I have left I would know how much I need to save for retirement. I might decide to retire now and do more volunteer work.
I can’t give the idea justice. I know the point is to suspend disbelief and contemplate “what would I do if”, but I can’t help thinking about the plot holes you could drive a truck through. Even not knowing where and how, as soon as you know the exact moment of your death that information (like all information) must change your behaviour, and hence that moment.
I’ve got about 10 years left. My mom recently died. About 10 years before that my dad. About 10 years before that a brother. At my mom’s service, I joked that we seem to have a funeral about every 10 years so in about 10 years we’ll have another except I’ll be in the urn and someone else will be the emcee.
Run up all the credit cards to the max.
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