Today is the true age of discovery. After exhausting the potential for earthly exploration, many of the world’s billionaires and greatest minds feel that the human race needs to explore the remaining universe in order to ensure its survival. The reason being that it is becoming increasingly certain that we are quickly running out of time on this planet. However, these thinkers and spenders have largely ignored that we are on the cusp of a much more pressing, and dare I say interesting, area of unexplored territory. Death.

While science is just beginning to investigate empirical issues, such as whether death is truly the end, what the worst way to die is, and if we can escape death almost indefinitely, much work is still needed on the more fundamental problem. Organisations, such as the International Necrounautical Society have formed with the intention to “map, enter, colonise, and, eventually, inhabit” death, but these attempts have proven largely futile in regard to the goal of advancing our culture’s understanding of this “space” in toto.

What is needed is to combine these concrete empirical studies into death with research into the existential significance which this certain ‘yet-to-come’ death has to human life. I believe that this may be the first time in history that this task is not only possible, but necessary. The first steps may have already been taken. Being and Dying is one example of the type of organisation that could break new ground in this area, and I am hopeful that this century will see the birth of many more like it to come.