Season 08 Episode 21: East of Edon (Pt.3 of 3)

manner of his death, how he bled to death. He is immediately propelled back to that time when they were only ten years old, giggling uncontrollably as Karl goosteps round the kitchen recounting for the hundredth time the story of how he had once lived before, only to die young,

bleeding to death. It's a haunting image now in more ways for Karl's family, his death is unsurprisingly catastrophic, not least of all for his fiancee, left without a partner to help raise her two daughters themselves left without a father.

But as the months go by, they two his parents more than anyone, will find their minds wandering back to those strange early years of Karl's life and those peculiar visions that had supposedly plagued his childhood, how he'd once crashed in a plane through a window, then lost his right leg before bleeding to death. Then in November nineteen ninety seven, just over two years after his death, something

extraordinary comes to light. It is the morning of November twenty seventh when workers for the Northumbrian water Board pull into the building site at the bottom of Clay Lane, just east of south Bank Station, barely a few miles down the track from the Grange Town signal box where Karl was stabbed. The team are there to install a sewage pipeline for a new business park due to be built nearby, and have not been working long when one

of their excavators hit something with the digging halted. Workers jump into the pit and begin the arduous task of scraping away the earth to see what the problem is. A short time later they uncover a strangely mangled metallic structure that seems to be wedged deep into the mud. Digging out more of the earth, one of the men uncovers some kind of sack. He rips it open and finds a bundle of pristine white silk stuffed inside. As he pulls the silk from the back, it soon becomes

clear he is unfurly and unused parachute. The men step back and look again at the hulk of metal in the ground. And realize with astonishment it is the frame of an aircraft. Concerned that they might not only have a warplane on their hands, but also some unexploded ordinance, the water board immediately ceased work and informed the British military's Royal Engineers of their discovery. Within days, a team

of ordnance disposal experts set about excavating the wreckage. The plane is soon identified as a German Second World warplane known as a Dornier Bomber. A quick check at the records reveals the plane to have crashed on the evening of January fifteenth, nineteen forty two, after taking a hit just off the coast and colliding with a barrage balloon

on the outskirts of Hartlepool. As the engineers dig deeper into the vessel, they find over five tons of wreckage, including a number of machine guns, a wooden propeller and two further parachutes, and finally a fragment of bone. From the records, it's ascertained that the bodies of three of the aircraft's crew, Jokim Lanes, Rudolph mattn and Heinrich Richter, were recovered from the plane shortly after it came down. A fourth body, that of Sergeant hands Manniker, was thought

to have been too badly destroyed to be removed. Digging a little further, the excavation team find a piece of the collar of a uniform that appears to confirm the missing body is indeed hands Maniker. But then the team dig deeper, only to find what appears to be a complete skeleton encased in the the manes of a different uniform. The missing body wasn't hands Manniker, after all, his body

had already been removed. The fourth member of the crew whose remains were thought to have been incinerated is in fact Heinrich Richter. Richter's remains are found in the plane's ventral gun, a gun that sat under the belly of

the plane encased in a glass bubble. The funny thing was, as the aircraft crashed nose first, this bubble, which was effectively a spherical glass window, would have borne the brunt of the initial impact and been smashed as smithreens in the process, covering the occupant in thousands of tiny shots, as if they had effectively crashed through a window. Similar, you might say, to the way the young Carl Eden had described plunging from the sky through shattered glass in

his terrifying dreams. But that wasn't the strangest thing. When the excavation team pulled the skeleton from the wreckage, they discover it isn't quite as complete as they had first thought. The right leg is missing. It had been severed in

the crash. News of the plains rediscovery soon spreads throughout the town, and the following year hands Manniker's unwitting grave site at Thornaby Cemetery is named correctly, and the additional remains of Heinrich Richter are laid to rest alongside his comrades. In October, a moving ceremony is attended by the German consul to Britain, as well as a handful of the crew's descendants, who are joined by twenty two British ex

servicemen and over two hundred members of the public. Together, they watch as seventy eight year old Heinz Molenbruk, a former Dornia pilot of the same unit who was shot down during the Battle of Britain, lays the first wreath on Richter's grave. He then places another on a monument for British airmen representing the fifty five thousand members of RIF Bomber Command, who, like Richter and his fellow crew members,

had never made it back home. As military standards are lowered and a bugler begins the opening refrain of the last post, two other faces join at the back of the crowd, Valerie and Jim Eden. Karl's parents have also come to pay their respects to the German airman who lost his leg and died after being shot down over England.

Some years later, after further investigative work, local Middlesbrough historian Bill Norman will eventually track down Heinrich Richter's family, publishing his findings in a book in two thousand eight called South Bank Dornia. As it transpired, Richter was born in nineteen eleven and was thirty at the time of his death. As Norman points out, regardless of what we may think of the cause for which he fought, Richter was undoubtedly

a brave man. Before dying in battle, he had already flown sixty missions, earning first and second class distinctions of the Iron Cross before his death in nineteen forty two. Norman also discovered that Richter had two brothers who were killed in the war as well, Kurt Richter, who perished while fighting in Russia in nineteen forty one, and Gerhardt,

who was killed in Romania nineteen forty four. Similar to what the young Karl had once claimed about the man, he had apparently been before, and although he never ascertained the name of Richter's mother, Bill Norman did discover that his father had been called Friedrich, a name frequently shortened to the more informal Fritz, the name Karl had also used. Then one morning, Bill receives a letter from another relative of Heinrich Richter's containing a striking portrait photograph of the

young airman shortly before he was killed. When Val and Jim see the picture for the first time, it is like seeing a ghost there staring back at them, with his strong nose and chin, and that distinct shape of his brow, it is hard not to distinguish the face of their son. The collar of Richter's jacket even bears the insignia of eagles, just as Karl had once depicted

it in his pictures all those years ago. Whatever we believe about the possibility of reincarnation, there is little doubt that in a physiological sense, through the inheritance of genes. We are all, in some way a reincarnation of those that have come before us, although we may not inherit literal memories of the deceased. Some fascinating new discoveries are challenging our understanding of the way in which our lived

experiences might biologically resurface long after we have gone. Prior to Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, another naturalist by the name of Jean Baptiste Lamark caused a stir with a theory of his own. He suggested that an organism might pass characteristics to its offspring not only through internal genetic mechanisms, but also through external influences that it

would have been affected by during its lifetime. Although the theory known as Lamarckism gained some traction at the time, it was soon eclipsed by Darwin's theory of evolution, before being widely discredited and falling out of fashion altogether, and

so it was destined to remain. However, a number of recent discoveries in the increasingly popular area of epigenetics have led to something of a Lamarkist comeback, bearing similarities to the principles of Lamarkism epigenetics is the study of how external and environmental factors can alter the functionality of genes

without corrupting the base genetic code. In twenty thirteen, neurobiologist Kerry Wrestler and his research partner Brian Dias published a paper in leading medical GiB Nature concerning the study of epigenetic inheritance in laboratory mice. What Wrestler and Dius had discovered was that by conditioning a set of mice to associate a scent with a specific trauma, in this case, a small electrical shock, that same fear would be passed

down to at least two generations of their pups. Taking this extraordinary discovery into account, we might say that in some ways, not only do we inherit our ancestors physical traits, but quite possibly an instinctive sense of some of their lived experiences as well, being the unquantifiable negative space that it is. Any concept of death, in turn, directly influences

the shape of its opposite space life. Very broadly speaking, if like the ancient Egyptians or followers of Abrahamic religion, you believe in an after life that rewards the morally virtuous, your lived life will likely be dictated by those moral expectations,

at least whatever you understand those morals to be. If you adopt religious teachings based on the principle of samsara, the idea of the material self being continually replaced in a way that has no relevance to your true essence, life becomes a process of attempting to transcend this material prison in return for a bliss without ego. For those who believe in neither, you maintain that this is all

there is. The focus tends to be solely on how your actions in life will surface you and the lives of others you come into contact with in life alone. Looking at it in these schematic terms, it boils down to two seemingly fundamental and conflicting ideas. Either our sense of identity is critically linked to our material body, in which case it dies with it, or it is not.

As our lives become increasingly incorporated into digital spaces, we may be discovering the tantalizing prospect of a convergence of these two most polarizing principles. If this convergence were to succeed, even for the most ardent anti theist or spiritual skeptic,

its potential seems positively theological in scope. If we maintain that our consciousness is wholly dependent on the material body, being something that most likely emerges via complex processes in the brain, we might also accept the possibility that a sufficiently sophisticated replication of a brain could one day allow for a mind to be held outside of the body first emerged in, although the information would need to be stored somewhere, which would require power to keep the mind alive.

Provided this was possible, might we one day be able to manufacture our own after lives. In nineteen sixty five, pioneering mathematician Irving John Good speculated on the potential for artificially generated intelligence to one day eclipse the functionality of

the human brain. It would do so in a moment of intelligence explosion, whereby a machine, on realizing the extent of its intelligence, would suddenly understand how to build another machine with greater capabilities that would in turn know how

to construct an even more capable machine. This triggering of a sudden exponential growth growth of artificial intelligence is now commonly referred to as the technological singularity, and for many in the tech community, such as leading computer scientists and tech pioneer Ray Kertzweil. This moment of singularity is not

a matter of if, but when. Kurtzweil has been making a name for himself since his time as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he pioneered the first text as speech technology and would later invent the world's first synthesizer to incorporate sampled instruments into its hardware. In twenty twelve, Kurtzweil was installed as Google's Director of Engineering to pursue development in machine learning and natural language understanding,

and is one of the world's most revered futurists. He is also a leading advocate of transhumanism, the belief that advancements in science and technology are fundament mental to achieving the next significant evolutionary steps for humankind. Although for some the notion of singularity might be alarming, for Kurtzwhil, its imminence is something to be celebrated, not least because he thinks it will ultimately hold the key to immortality, whether

we want it or not. With an artificially generated superintelligence, Kertzweil predicts a biotechnological revolution that would enable us to upload our conscious minds, either into virtual worlds or indestructible robotic bodies. This, in a theory, would allow us to live for however long the universe remains a stable place to inhabit, provided, of course, the new intelligence deems us necessary to have around in the first place. It would

be an after life of sorts. If we take that to mean an experience of consciousness after the death of our present bodies. Such a notion would require a relinquishing of our bodies as a fundamental component of our sense of identity, something, as revealed in a fascinating two thousand and four study by scientists from University College London, that

isn't as improbable as it might sound. In the experiment, subjects were asked to sit at a table and place their left hand in front of them, with their right arms screened off from view. A dummy hand made of rubber was then laid out next to their left in place of their real right hand, with subjects told to focus on the two hands in front of them, both the real left and the dummy right. Researchers then stroked both the subjects fake right hand and real right hand

behind the screen at the same time. Before long, subjects claimed to feel their dummy hand being stroked, even when researchers were no longer stroking their real hand at the same time. Later, when asked to point to their right hand with their left, subjects invariably pointed to the fake rubber hand instead of the real one behind the screen.

Although there would be some way to go yet, The two thousand and four That's My Hand study, as it was known, poses interesting questions about the potential for realizing entire other bodies, either in a virtual, digital, or indeed physical space, as exemplified in James Cameron's two thousand and nine blockbuster Avatar. In Cameron's pioneering film, Paralyzed soldier Jake Sully is given the opportunity to drive fabricated shell of a Navvy, a creature indigenous to the alien planet Pandora.

Jake's task is to integrate himself into the Navvy community to better help the human colonization of their planet, a task he performs so well that by the end he has achieved a complete transfusion with its new body. This notion, if it were one day realized, might finally deliver an

answer to Theseus's paradox. This ancient conundrum asks us to consider whether an object in the original case, King Theseus's ship can be considered the same object if all of its component parts have at some point been completely replaced. In Jake Sully's case, at least, the answer is broadly speaking yes. Even now, we are increasingly imparting pieces of ourselves into the digital realm, be that our visual memories, or even just the small things we deem unnecessary to

have to keep in our heads, like phone numbers. As hellish as it may sound to some, it is surely only a matter of time before we are able to keep a twenty four hour audio and visual record of our day to day experiences. We might even elect to store our emotional responses to these experiences somewhere digitally too. Future scenarios might see us being able to back up our individual conscious selves onto storage facilities that will allow us to be dropped in to any number of post

body experiences after death. Charlie Brooker's deeply touching and evocative Black Mirror episode San Junipero explores just one possibility with its examination of a computer generated afterlife where our minds are given the opportunity to continue living in a romantic

idealized world of neon lights and beach glamor. But why might we stop with singular after life experiences in the manner of Pierre Tilhard de Chardin's concept of the noo sphere, as explored in season six, episode twenty eight the noose Sphere, Might we then be able to fuse with the experiences

of all those other digitally stored entities. In this way, ourselves would become extant, as just one of a series of networked data points in an interconnected system, free to merge together into one vast single consciousness, a fully mechanized system of universal oneness. You might say, perhaps this networked digital space might one day encompass the entirety of the known universe, acted through all matter. It would be as

if the universe had become self aware. Then again, who's to say that such a space wouldn't also fall into hierarchies similar to what we have in our present material worlds, where places would emerge kept hidden and away and only accessible to those with the requisite power and knowledge, perhaps controlled by gate keepers, just like the five realms of Hades.

There is just one small problem, though, the second law of thermodynamics, it seems presently that even the digital heaven of San Junipero would likely have to one day come to an end, since any such place would require a mechanism to store information, which, in time would itself eventually die.

As the second law states entropy, the level of disorder in a system only increases, much like the way an ice cube melts in hot water, as the universe continues to expand, or the heat or energy contained within is predicted to become so uniformly dispersed that processes which rely on the transference of energy to function will no longer

be possible. Whatever the truth of our potential to be reincarnated, or to recall the lives of others, or indeed to exist in a vast shared conscious space side by side with each other, one thing is for certain. We are all cosmically significant, whether it be to day as the collection of matter that we call ourselves, or to morrow

as a piece of star dust. For as long as the universe exists, we will always be here, in one form or another, making up a part of it, forever changing from one thing to another in a constant balance cycle of birth, death, and Rebirth. This episode was written by Richard McLain smith Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me

Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.

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