Just as much as we like to understand how life began, we also want a better idea of what happens to us after we die. And hey, there are billions of people who already know the answer to that scientific question. Unfortunately, they can't tell us about it because, well, they're all dead.
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The subject of the afterlife — or lack thereof — is one of the oldest questions troubling humankind. Will we all float off into eternal bliss? Will the evil among us be damned to the pits of hell? Will our consciousness merely vanish once our bodies have expired? Or will we all be reincarnated as bizarre fish or fluffy cats?
Scientists do understand the beginning stages of death. They know how the human body begins shutting down. Like store employees turning off the lights at a megastore after closing hours, your body's cells begin to blink off, one by one, until your heart and brain cease activity.
What happens after your brain clicks off, though, is still a complete mystery. Many people who have gone through near-death experiences and then come back to life speak about tunnels of light or flashbacks to life occurrences or conversations with loved ones who've passed away.
All of those experiences could have biological origins, perhaps spurred by a lack of oxygen or wild biochemical fluctuations.
Of the many questions we face about our existence, this is one that we may never, ever get an answer to. Instead, we'll all be left yearning, searching for some sort of meaning in the death.
When you look up on a dark night and see the uncountable stars scattered throughout the skies, it's easy to think of the universe as infinite. Or maybe you see those illuminations as similar to the glow-in-the-dark stars on your bedrooms ceiling, just pretty decorations to behold, a high but dead-end ceiling. Either way, science can't really tell us yet whether the universe is infinite or finite.
As with everything else, researchers do have theories.
After analyzing maps generated by observations made with the Baryon Oscillation Spectrographic Survey (BOSS), a super-powerful telescope in New Mexico, one group determined that the universe has an exceedingly flat floor plan. The survey was based on observations of "only" 1.2 million galaxies, which is a drop in the universal bucket, but it's a strong clue that our universe isn't sphere-shaped.
So is that flatness infinite? It's impossible to say. One reigning thought is that the Big Bang is causing the universe to constantly expand faster than the speed of light. Because we can't see beyond the speed of light, we'll never really know if there's an edge to the universe.
We'll likely have to spend our lives wondering about the true nature of the universe's size. It's a mystery, like so many others, that's overflowing with a captivating allure that draws our minds but never offers any real answers.
Whether you're struggling with how big the universe might be or how life originated on Earth, our existence is brimming with bizarre twists of nature that we can't explain and may never understand. Those questions may trouble us and hound us for our entire lives — but they are also an essential part of the human experience.