eftychia: Spaceship superimposed on a whirling vortex (departure)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 06:34am on 2008-04-27

[I should be asleep but leg cramps keep interfering.]

I just had a rather distracting mental image: dead anthropologists roaming around Heaven taking a census and interviewing people, trying to find the earliest humans present there, in order to figure out at what point in human evolution we started having souls.

That would be an unscientific question here among the living unless someone concocts an experiment that will demonstrate or falsify the existence of the soul in scientific terms, but presumably a scientist in Heaven would consider the existence question resolved (after sufficient observation to determine what was going on), and would feel free to continue conducting science based on the data newly available to hir. (And, of course, if there's no afterlife after all, then there's no scientist in the afterlife to do science there and this paragraph becomes moot, so I don't feel bad about phrasing it as assuming the existence of the afterlife. Pbbbt!)

I wonder what other science experiments dead scientists might wind up performing in the hereafter.

There are 2 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] nancylebov.livejournal.com at 12:55pm on 2008-04-27
Some of it would depend on whether they still have access to matter.

An anthropologist would indeed be in heaven if they were in heaven, at least until it occurred to them that there were a lot of people in hell, so you can't get the whole picture of the human race from heaven. You could visit hell (and it would make one hell of a decent short story, but I don't think you could trust the people in hell to tell you the truth.

One of my favorite Kipling poems:
When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it -- lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy; they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets' hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from -- Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!

And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 12:55pm on 2008-04-27
There was, a few years ago, a Sentinel/Neil Gaimanverse fanfic about Death meeting Blair Sandburg, who wanted to do an anthropological study on him. Blair was sent back to life fairly quickly. Binky was amused, though; he liked Blair.

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