Do you think someone who died can communicate back to people still living on earth?
It’s kind of a loaded question. The big assumption, of course, is that there is an afterlife, that people exist in some form after they die.
And then there’s the matter of transmission. How would one transmit a message from the afterlife back to here? Is communication the same there as it is here, or would a further step be necessary to get the message into our language and then transmit it back here?
And this says nothing of why someone would want to do this. On this side of things, it just sounds good. Like, “Of course we’d want to communicate back, to let everyone know we’re okay, to let everyone know we’re not okay,” if that’s how things turn out.
I’ve heard the question posed about time travel, that if it were possible, where are all the time travelers from the future who would be traveling back to us? That kind of reasoning bakes in an awful lot of assumptions about how time travel would work and why someone would do it.
The same could be said about the dead person communicating back to us, like it was possible, why don’t we hear from anyone? But there are a bunch of assumptions in that too, assumptions about how that communication would work, why someone would do it, and even whether or not we do have examples of communication from people who’ve died.
I like to think about this kind of stuff, especially since I planned to die when I turned 30.
I’d also like to propose another, “less cool… but still pretty cool” way to do it too, one that people have been doing for years.
Jane Austin died. But we’re still reading her books. Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin… I could go through a whole alphabet of people named Charles who are still communicating back to us after they’ve died.
That’s kind of cool.
But let’s take it a level further.
Wouldn’t it be cooler if we could read something for the first time after someone died? Like we get those books that are published posthumously. That’s kind of cool. I, as an alive person, don’t even have a traditionally published book out there in the world. But what if you could send someone something after you died, like so they had no way of seeing it while you were alive, so it came to them as though you were alive even after you died?
I think I could do that.
What if I set up an email program, wrote some emails, and scheduled them to send after I die?
Again, just something I’m thinking about.
