In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

Like birth, dying has its own timetable and cannot be thwarted and so requires neither courage nor willingness, though both help enormously.

There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost the precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be ten to the negative 230—that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it. Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are.

through only one slit. But now the universe had a problem: Entangled particles have to do the exact same thing, but the delayed choice had tricked them into acting differently. That was impossible. When researchers checked the strike plate of the first test, though, they found that the wave function had been retroactively collapsed by the second test and forced through a single slit. Quantum information had been erased.

We’re all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it’s gotten dark; the only question is whether we’re with people we love or not. There is no other thing—no belief or religion or faith—there is just that. Just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.