Speaker 1: You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained,
Speaker 1: season eight, episode twenty one, East of Eden. When Karl's
Speaker 1: old school friend Michael first hears about his murder, he
Speaker 1: is shocked and upset when he learns of the violent
Speaker 1: manner of his death, how he bled to death. He
Speaker 1: is immediately propelled back to that time when they were
Speaker 1: only ten years old, giggling uncontrollably as Karl goosteps round
Speaker 1: the kitchen recounting for the hundredth time the story of
Speaker 1: how he had once lived before, only to die young,
Speaker 1: bleeding to death. It's a haunting image now in more
Speaker 1: ways for Karl's family, his death is unsurprisingly catastrophic, not
Speaker 1: least of all for his fiancee, left without a partner
Speaker 1: to help raise her two daughters themselves left without a father.
Speaker 1: But as the months go by, they two his parents
Speaker 1: more than anyone, will find their minds wandering back to
Speaker 1: those strange early years of Karl's life and those peculiar
Speaker 1: visions that had supposedly plagued his childhood, how he'd once
Speaker 1: crashed in a plane through a window, then lost his
Speaker 1: right leg before bleeding to death. Then in November nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven, just over two years after his death, something
Speaker 1: extraordinary comes to light. It is the morning of November
Speaker 1: twenty seventh when workers for the Northumbrian water Board pull
Speaker 1: into the building site at the bottom of Clay Lane,
Speaker 1: just east of south Bank Station, barely a few miles
Speaker 1: down the track from the Grange Town signal box where
Speaker 1: Karl was stabbed. The team are there to install a
Speaker 1: sewage pipeline for a new business park due to be
Speaker 1: built nearby, and have not been working long when one
Speaker 1: of their excavators hit something with the digging halted. Workers
Speaker 1: jump into the pit and begin the arduous task of
Speaker 1: scraping away the earth to see what the problem is.
Speaker 1: A short time later they uncover a strangely mangled metallic
Speaker 1: structure that seems to be wedged deep into the mud.
Speaker 1: Digging out more of the earth, one of the men
Speaker 1: uncovers some kind of sack. He rips it open and
Speaker 1: finds a bundle of pristine white silk stuffed inside. As
Speaker 1: he pulls the silk from the back, it soon becomes
Speaker 1: clear he is unfurly and unused parachute. The men step
Speaker 1: back and look again at the hulk of metal in
Speaker 1: the ground. And realize with astonishment it is the frame
Speaker 1: of an aircraft. Concerned that they might not only have
Speaker 1: a warplane on their hands, but also some unexploded ordinance,
Speaker 1: the water board immediately ceased work and informed the British
Speaker 1: military's Royal Engineers of their discovery. Within days, a team
Speaker 1: of ordnance disposal experts set about excavating the wreckage. The
Speaker 1: plane is soon identified as a German Second World warplane
Speaker 1: known as a Dornier Bomber. A quick check at the
Speaker 1: records reveals the plane to have crashed on the evening
Speaker 1: of January fifteenth, nineteen forty two, after taking a hit
Speaker 1: just off the coast and colliding with a barrage balloon
Speaker 1: on the outskirts of Hartlepool. As the engineers dig deeper
Speaker 1: into the vessel, they find over five tons of wreckage,
Speaker 1: including a number of machine guns, a wooden propeller and
Speaker 1: two further parachutes, and finally a fragment of bone. From
Speaker 1: the records, it's ascertained that the bodies of three of
Speaker 1: the aircraft's crew, Jokim Lanes, Rudolph mattn and Heinrich Richter,
Speaker 1: were recovered from the plane shortly after it came down.
Speaker 1: A fourth body, that of Sergeant hands Manniker, was thought
Speaker 1: to have been too badly destroyed to be removed. Digging
Speaker 1: a little further, the excavation team find a piece of
Speaker 1: the collar of a uniform that appears to confirm the
Speaker 1: missing body is indeed hands Maniker. But then the team
Speaker 1: dig deeper, only to find what appears to be a
Speaker 1: complete skeleton encased in the the manes of a different uniform.
Speaker 1: The missing body wasn't hands Manniker, after all, his body
Speaker 1: had already been removed. The fourth member of the crew
Speaker 1: whose remains were thought to have been incinerated is in
Speaker 1: fact Heinrich Richter. Richter's remains are found in the plane's
Speaker 1: ventral gun, a gun that sat under the belly of
Speaker 1: the plane encased in a glass bubble. The funny thing was,
Speaker 1: as the aircraft crashed nose first, this bubble, which was
Speaker 1: effectively a spherical glass window, would have borne the brunt
Speaker 1: of the initial impact and been smashed as smithreens in
Speaker 1: the process, covering the occupant in thousands of tiny shots,
Speaker 1: as if they had effectively crashed through a window. Similar,
Speaker 1: you might say, to the way the young Carl Eden
Speaker 1: had described plunging from the sky through shattered glass in
Speaker 1: his terrifying dreams. But that wasn't the strangest thing. When
Speaker 1: the excavation team pulled the skeleton from the wreckage, they
Speaker 1: discover it isn't quite as complete as they had first thought.
Speaker 1: The right leg is missing. It had been severed in
Speaker 1: the crash. News of the plains rediscovery soon spreads throughout
Speaker 1: the town, and the following year hands Manniker's unwitting grave
Speaker 1: site at Thornaby Cemetery is named correctly, and the additional
Speaker 1: remains of Heinrich Richter are laid to rest alongside his comrades.
Speaker 1: In October, a moving ceremony is attended by the German
Speaker 1: consul to Britain, as well as a handful of the
Speaker 1: crew's descendants, who are joined by twenty two British ex
Speaker 1: servicemen and over two hundred members of the public. Together,
Speaker 1: they watch as seventy eight year old Heinz Molenbruk, a
Speaker 1: former Dornia pilot of the same unit who was shot
Speaker 1: down during the Battle of Britain, lays the first wreath
Speaker 1: on Richter's grave. He then places another on a monument
Speaker 1: for British airmen representing the fifty five thousand members of
Speaker 1: RIF Bomber Command, who, like Richter and his fellow crew members,
Speaker 1: had never made it back home. As military standards are
Speaker 1: lowered and a bugler begins the opening refrain of the
Speaker 1: last post, two other faces join at the back of
Speaker 1: the crowd, Valerie and Jim Eden. Karl's parents have also
Speaker 1: come to pay their respects to the German airman who
Speaker 1: lost his leg and died after being shot down over England.
Speaker 1: Some years later, after further investigative work, local Middlesbrough historian
Speaker 1: Bill Norman will eventually track down Heinrich Richter's family, publishing
Speaker 1: his findings in a book in two thousand eight called
Speaker 1: South Bank Dornia. As it transpired, Richter was born in
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven and was thirty at the time of his death.
Speaker 1: As Norman points out, regardless of what we may think
Speaker 1: of the cause for which he fought, Richter was undoubtedly
Speaker 1: a brave man. Before dying in battle, he had already
Speaker 1: flown sixty missions, earning first and second class distinctions of
Speaker 1: the Iron Cross before his death in nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1: Norman also discovered that Richter had two brothers who were
Speaker 1: killed in the war as well, Kurt Richter, who perished
Speaker 1: while fighting in Russia in nineteen forty one, and Gerhardt,
Speaker 1: who was killed in Romania nineteen forty four. Similar to
Speaker 1: what the young Karl had once claimed about the man,
Speaker 1: he had apparently been before, and although he never ascertained
Speaker 1: the name of Richter's mother, Bill Norman did discover that
Speaker 1: his father had been called Friedrich, a name frequently shortened
Speaker 1: to the more informal Fritz, the name Karl had also used.
Speaker 1: Then one morning, Bill receives a letter from another relative
Speaker 1: of Heinrich Richter's containing a striking portrait photograph of the
Speaker 1: young airman shortly before he was killed. When Val and
Speaker 1: Jim see the picture for the first time, it is
Speaker 1: like seeing a ghost there staring back at them, with
Speaker 1: his strong nose and chin, and that distinct shape of
Speaker 1: his brow, it is hard not to distinguish the face
Speaker 1: of their son. The collar of Richter's jacket even bears
Speaker 1: the insignia of eagles, just as Karl had once depicted
Speaker 1: it in his pictures all those years ago. Whatever we
Speaker 1: believe about the possibility of reincarnation, there is little doubt
Speaker 1: that in a physiological sense, through the inheritance of genes.
Speaker 1: We are all, in some way a reincarnation of those
Speaker 1: that have come before us, although we may not inherit
Speaker 1: literal memories of the deceased. Some fascinating new discoveries are
Speaker 1: challenging our understanding of the way in which our lived
Speaker 1: experiences might biologically resurface long after we have gone. Prior
Speaker 1: to Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, another naturalist
Speaker 1: by the name of Jean Baptiste Lamark caused a stir
Speaker 1: with a theory of his own. He suggested that an
Speaker 1: organism might pass characteristics to its offspring not only through
Speaker 1: internal genetic mechanisms, but also through external influences that it
Speaker 1: would have been affected by during its lifetime. Although the
Speaker 1: theory known as Lamarckism gained some traction at the time,
Speaker 1: it was soon eclipsed by Darwin's theory of evolution, before
Speaker 1: being widely discredited and falling out of fashion altogether, and
Speaker 1: so it was destined to remain. However, a number of
Speaker 1: recent discoveries in the increasingly popular area of epigenetics have
Speaker 1: led to something of a Lamarkist comeback, bearing similarities to
Speaker 1: the principles of Lamarkism epigenetics is the study of how
Speaker 1: external and environmental factors can alter the functionality of genes
Speaker 1: without corrupting the base genetic code. In twenty thirteen, neurobiologist
Speaker 1: Kerry Wrestler and his research partner Brian Dias published a
Speaker 1: paper in leading medical GiB Nature concerning the study of
Speaker 1: epigenetic inheritance in laboratory mice. What Wrestler and Dius had
Speaker 1: discovered was that by conditioning a set of mice to
Speaker 1: associate a scent with a specific trauma, in this case,
Speaker 1: a small electrical shock, that same fear would be passed
Speaker 1: down to at least two generations of their pups. Taking
Speaker 1: this extraordinary discovery into account, we might say that in
Speaker 1: some ways, not only do we inherit our ancestors physical traits,
Speaker 1: but quite possibly an instinctive sense of some of their
Speaker 1: lived experiences as well, being the unquantifiable negative space that
Speaker 1: it is. Any concept of death, in turn, directly influences
Speaker 1: the shape of its opposite space life. Very broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: if like the ancient Egyptians or followers of Abrahamic religion,
Speaker 1: you believe in an after life that rewards the morally virtuous,
Speaker 1: your lived life will likely be dictated by those moral expectations,
Speaker 1: at least whatever you understand those morals to be. If
Speaker 1: you adopt religious teachings based on the principle of samsara,
Speaker 1: the idea of the material self being continually replaced in
Speaker 1: a way that has no relevance to your true essence,
Speaker 1: life becomes a process of attempting to transcend this material
Speaker 1: prison in return for a bliss without ego. For those
Speaker 1: who believe in neither, you maintain that this is all
Speaker 1: there is. The focus tends to be solely on how
Speaker 1: your actions in life will surface you and the lives
Speaker 1: of others you come into contact with in life alone.
Speaker 1: Looking at it in these schematic terms, it boils down
Speaker 1: to two seemingly fundamental and conflicting ideas. Either our sense
Speaker 1: of identity is critically linked to our material body, in
Speaker 1: which case it dies with it, or it is not.
Speaker 1: As our lives become increasingly incorporated into digital spaces, we
Speaker 1: may be discovering the tantalizing prospect of a convergence of
Speaker 1: these two most polarizing principles. If this convergence were to succeed,
Speaker 1: even for the most ardent anti theist or spiritual skeptic,
Speaker 1: its potential seems positively theological in scope. If we maintain
Speaker 1: that our consciousness is wholly dependent on the material body,
Speaker 1: being something that most likely emerges via complex processes in
Speaker 1: the brain, we might also accept the possibility that a
Speaker 1: sufficiently sophisticated replication of a brain could one day allow
Speaker 1: for a mind to be held outside of the body
Speaker 1: first emerged in, although the information would need to be
Speaker 1: stored somewhere, which would require power to keep the mind alive.
Speaker 1: Provided this was possible, might we one day be able
Speaker 1: to manufacture our own after lives. In nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: pioneering mathematician Irving John Good speculated on the potential for
Speaker 1: artificially generated intelligence to one day eclipse the functionality of
Speaker 1: the human brain. It would do so in a moment
Speaker 1: of intelligence explosion, whereby a machine, on realizing the extent
Speaker 1: of its intelligence, would suddenly understand how to build another
Speaker 1: machine with greater capabilities that would in turn know how
Speaker 1: to construct an even more capable machine. This triggering of
Speaker 1: a sudden exponential growth growth of artificial intelligence is now
Speaker 1: commonly referred to as the technological singularity, and for many
Speaker 1: in the tech community, such as leading computer scientists and
Speaker 1: tech pioneer Ray Kertzweil. This moment of singularity is not
Speaker 1: a matter of if, but when. Kurtzweil has been making
Speaker 1: a name for himself since his time as a student
Speaker 1: at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he pioneered the
Speaker 1: first text as speech technology and would later invent the
Speaker 1: world's first synthesizer to incorporate sampled instruments into its hardware.
Speaker 1: In twenty twelve, Kurtzweil was installed as Google's Director of
Speaker 1: Engineering to pursue development in machine learning and natural language understanding,
Speaker 1: and is one of the world's most revered futurists. He
Speaker 1: is also a leading advocate of transhumanism, the belief that
Speaker 1: advancements in science and technology are fundament mental to achieving
Speaker 1: the next significant evolutionary steps for humankind. Although for some
Speaker 1: the notion of singularity might be alarming, for Kurtzwhil, its
Speaker 1: imminence is something to be celebrated, not least because he
Speaker 1: thinks it will ultimately hold the key to immortality, whether
Speaker 1: we want it or not. With an artificially generated superintelligence,
Speaker 1: Kertzweil predicts a biotechnological revolution that would enable us to
Speaker 1: upload our conscious minds, either into virtual worlds or indestructible
Speaker 1: robotic bodies. This, in a theory, would allow us to
Speaker 1: live for however long the universe remains a stable place
Speaker 1: to inhabit, provided, of course, the new intelligence deems us
Speaker 1: necessary to have around in the first place. It would
Speaker 1: be an after life of sorts. If we take that
Speaker 1: to mean an experience of consciousness after the death of
Speaker 1: our present bodies. Such a notion would require a relinquishing
Speaker 1: of our bodies as a fundamental component of our sense
Speaker 1: of identity, something, as revealed in a fascinating two thousand
Speaker 1: and four study by scientists from University College London, that
Speaker 1: isn't as improbable as it might sound. In the experiment,
Speaker 1: subjects were asked to sit at a table and place
Speaker 1: their left hand in front of them, with their right
Speaker 1: arms screened off from view. A dummy hand made of
Speaker 1: rubber was then laid out next to their left in
Speaker 1: place of their real right hand, with subjects told to
Speaker 1: focus on the two hands in front of them, both
Speaker 1: the real left and the dummy right. Researchers then stroked
Speaker 1: both the subjects fake right hand and real right hand
Speaker 1: behind the screen at the same time. Before long, subjects
Speaker 1: claimed to feel their dummy hand being stroked, even when
Speaker 1: researchers were no longer stroking their real hand at the
Speaker 1: same time. Later, when asked to point to their right
Speaker 1: hand with their left, subjects invariably pointed to the fake
Speaker 1: rubber hand instead of the real one behind the screen.
Speaker 1: Although there would be some way to go yet, The
Speaker 1: two thousand and four That's My Hand study, as it
Speaker 1: was known, poses interesting questions about the potential for realizing
Speaker 1: entire other bodies, either in a virtual, digital, or indeed
Speaker 1: physical space, as exemplified in James Cameron's two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine blockbuster Avatar. In Cameron's pioneering film, Paralyzed soldier Jake
Speaker 1: Sully is given the opportunity to drive fabricated shell of
Speaker 1: a Navvy, a creature indigenous to the alien planet Pandora.
Speaker 1: Jake's task is to integrate himself into the Navvy community
Speaker 1: to better help the human colonization of their planet, a
Speaker 1: task he performs so well that by the end he
Speaker 1: has achieved a complete transfusion with its new body. This notion,
Speaker 1: if it were one day realized, might finally deliver an
Speaker 1: answer to Theseus's paradox. This ancient conundrum asks us to
Speaker 1: consider whether an object in the original case, King Theseus's
Speaker 1: ship can be considered the same object if all of
Speaker 1: its component parts have at some point been completely replaced.
Speaker 1: In Jake Sully's case, at least, the answer is broadly
Speaker 1: speaking yes. Even now, we are increasingly imparting pieces of
Speaker 1: ourselves into the digital realm, be that our visual memories,
Speaker 1: or even just the small things we deem unnecessary to
Speaker 1: have to keep in our heads, like phone numbers. As
Speaker 1: hellish as it may sound to some, it is surely
Speaker 1: only a matter of time before we are able to
Speaker 1: keep a twenty four hour audio and visual record of
Speaker 1: our day to day experiences. We might even elect to
Speaker 1: store our emotional responses to these experiences somewhere digitally too.
Speaker 1: Future scenarios might see us being able to back up
Speaker 1: our individual conscious selves onto storage facilities that will allow
Speaker 1: us to be dropped in to any number of post
Speaker 1: body experiences after death. Charlie Brooker's deeply touching and evocative
Speaker 1: Black Mirror episode San Junipero explores just one possibility with
Speaker 1: its examination of a computer generated afterlife where our minds
Speaker 1: are given the opportunity to continue living in a romantic
Speaker 1: idealized world of neon lights and beach glamor. But why
Speaker 1: might we stop with singular after life experiences in the
Speaker 1: manner of Pierre Tilhard de Chardin's concept of the noo sphere,
Speaker 1: as explored in season six, episode twenty eight the noose Sphere,
Speaker 1: Might we then be able to fuse with the experiences
Speaker 1: of all those other digitally stored entities. In this way,
Speaker 1: ourselves would become extant, as just one of a series
Speaker 1: of networked data points in an interconnected system, free to
Speaker 1: merge together into one vast single consciousness, a fully mechanized
Speaker 1: system of universal oneness. You might say, perhaps this networked
Speaker 1: digital space might one day encompass the entirety of the
Speaker 1: known universe, acted through all matter. It would be as
Speaker 1: if the universe had become self aware. Then again, who's
Speaker 1: to say that such a space wouldn't also fall into
Speaker 1: hierarchies similar to what we have in our present material worlds,
Speaker 1: where places would emerge kept hidden and away and only
Speaker 1: accessible to those with the requisite power and knowledge, perhaps
Speaker 1: controlled by gate keepers, just like the five realms of Hades.
Speaker 1: There is just one small problem, though, the second law
Speaker 1: of thermodynamics, it seems presently that even the digital heaven
Speaker 1: of San Junipero would likely have to one day come
Speaker 1: to an end, since any such place would require a
Speaker 1: mechanism to store information, which, in time would itself eventually die.
Speaker 1: As the second law states entropy, the level of disorder
Speaker 1: in a system only increases, much like the way an
Speaker 1: ice cube melts in hot water, as the universe continues
Speaker 1: to expand, or the heat or energy contained within is
Speaker 1: predicted to become so uniformly dispersed that processes which rely
Speaker 1: on the transference of energy to function will no longer
Speaker 1: be possible. Whatever the truth of our potential to be reincarnated,
Speaker 1: or to recall the lives of others, or indeed to
Speaker 1: exist in a vast shared conscious space side by side
Speaker 1: with each other, one thing is for certain. We are
Speaker 1: all cosmically significant, whether it be to day as the
Speaker 1: collection of matter that we call ourselves, or to morrow
Speaker 1: as a piece of star dust. For as long as
Speaker 1: the universe exists, we will always be here, in one
Speaker 1: form or another, making up a part of it, forever
Speaker 1: changing from one thing to another in a constant balance
Speaker 1: cycle of birth, death, and Rebirth. This episode was written
Speaker 1: by Richard McLain smith Unexplained as an AV Club Productions
Speaker 1: podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of
Speaker 1: the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me
Speaker 1: Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now
Speaker 1: available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes
Speaker 1: and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and
Speaker 1: rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel
Speaker 1: free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas
Speaker 1: regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you
Speaker 1: have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
Speaker 1: You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
Speaker 1: and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and
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