All Deaths

The end of life: from Oceans to robots

A work about death, its limits and its evolution has the greatest unknown that Humanity has ever faced.

There is not just a single definition of death, not just a single interpretation, but there is a leitmotif based on our scientific understanding of a mortal reality. Arguably there is not just a single death in the course of one’s life, but many of them. Ricard Solé, a physicist, biologist and researcher for the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA in Catalan) delivers his take on all these extinctions: from the thermal death of the universe and the inanimate systems, until cities and civilizations, oceans or robots, and also the demise of our bodies and minds. To write and reflect on the end of life allows us to improve our understanding of the nature of this inescapable and most common reality that has shaped our culture and moulded our fears since the birth of consciousness —and our permanent need of imagining the future.

Gathering the legacy of those who have used literature, cinema, theatre, philosophy or science to write about bereavement, All Deaths focuses on a scientific, critical and open approach to rethink the several scenarios in which we can address death in strictly rigorous terms. This exploration will provide us with answers and new contributions about essential questions regarding the existence of immortality, about how to dodge the demise of everything, and how the idea of a finite human life emerges and evolves, or if a conscious machine can live forever, or if it is possible to manipulate the behaviour of the cells to avoid our own decease.