Category: death

Do astronauts carry suicide pills?

April 2, 2026 • 10:45 am

This is a question I’ve entertained for a long time, probably because I’m preoccupied with death.  But I was curious about what would happen if astronauts, like the ones going around the Moon now, found themselves stranded in space with no way to get home, facing death from oxygen depletion or starvation. Or what would happen if the astronauts who were on the Moon years couldn’t start up the Lunar Module to get back to the Command Module and then back to Earth? Would they have been carrying something that would allow them to commit suicide quickly, avoiding a prolonged death?

I asked Jim Batterson, our resident NASA expert, and he didn’t know the answer.  I then turned to the AI bot Grok, which I got for free when X (“Twitter”)—for reasons unknown—gave me a free blue checkmark.

My question to Grok  is in bold below, and the short answer (indented) is that no, American astronauts don’t carry anything to do themselves in, though one Russian astronaut did.  Grok went though the data in 11 seconds, and spat out the following. Note that there are references (the bot gives you the links, which I haven’t included) to check the statements.

Do the astronauts carry cyanide capsules or anything they can use to commit suicide if they are stuck in space?
Thought for 11s

No, astronauts do not carry cyanide capsules or any dedicated suicide pills as standard equipment.

iflscience.com

NASA has never issued suicide pills (sometimes called “L-pills” or cyanide capsules) to its astronauts, including during the Apollo lunar missions or on current ISS and Artemis programs. Astronaut Jim Lovell (Apollo 13 commander) explicitly debunked this long-standing rumor: “Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, ‘Did you have suicide pills on board?’ We didn’t, and I never heard of such a thing in the eleven years I spent as an astronaut and NASA executive.”

iflscience.com

The idea appears to stem from spy-movie tropes, urban legends, or sci-fi (e.g., the film Contact), but it has been consistently denied by NASA and astronauts. Multiple sources, including direct statements from astronauts, confirm that no such pills have ever been part of U.S. spaceflight medical kits.

quora.com

Why the rumor persists, and why pills aren’t needed anywayIn a worst-case scenario of being stranded in space with no rescue possible (e.g., a failed re-entry or detached during a spacewalk), astronauts have pointed out that the vacuum of space itself provides a relatively quick way to end life if someone chose to—by simply opening a suit valve or venting the spacecraft’s atmosphere. This would cause unconsciousness in seconds and death shortly after, making a pill unnecessary.

theguardian.com

NASA’s focus is on prevention and survival: rigorous psychological screening, crew training, rescue protocols (e.g., multiple docked return vehicles on the ISS), and detailed medical kits. Those kits contain painkillers, anti-nausea drugs, antibiotics, etc., but nothing lethal like cyanide.

nasa.gov

If an astronaut were to experience a mental health crisis in space (e.g., becoming suicidal or psychotic), NASA has written procedures: crewmates are instructed to restrain the person with duct tape and bungee cords, monitor them, and administer sedatives like Haldol or Valium (orally or by injection if needed). The goal is stabilization, not euthanasia.

cbsnews.com

One historical exception (Soviet side) The only verified case involves Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (the first person to spacewalk, in 1965 on Voskhod 2). He stated that he was issued a suicide pill for that specific high-risk mission—in case he couldn’t re-enter the spacecraft and his crewmate had to leave him behind in orbit. His suit ballooned during the walk, and he barely made it back inside after partially depressurizing it. This was not standard practice for the Soviet program overall, and no evidence exists of it being routine for cosmonauts then or now.

iflscience.com

In short, modern astronauts (NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc.) rely on engineering, training, and international rescue plans rather than personal suicide options. No agency equips crews with cyanide or equivalent for “stuck in space” scenarios.

Watch Queen Elizabeth’s funeral

September 19, 2022 • 5:31 am

Right now Queen Elizabeth’s funeral service is happening, with all the pomp and circumstance you can imagine, at Westminster Abbey. The NYT is offering a live feed with real-time updates. Click on the screenshot to see both.  Right now I just heard the preacher (presumably the Archbishop of Canterbury) say: “There is one thing we know for sure: death is the doorway to glory.”

Click on either photo to go to the site, and look at the pinned article at the top to see commentary

And there’s a spider on her coffin–for real! (h/t: Matthew. I’ve put an arrow by it:

The old faker Uri Geller also tells us to watch for omens:

“Proof” of the afterlife in the Globe and Mail!

April 6, 2021 • 12:45 pm

The Globe and Mail is, I believe, a conservative newspaper, and one would guess that it’s that genre of paper that’s prone to printing palpable palaver that props up religion. (Well, one would guess wrong, as now papers like the New York Times do it as well.)

Here from the new G&M we have Cathy Bohlken, a respiratory therapist from Calgary, telling us how, after having rejected the existence of an afterlife, came to believe in it after all. Click on the screenshot to proceed:

Bohlken tells us that her scientific training led her to doubt the existence of an afterlife—until her boyfriend committed suicide. Then she had the need to get in touch with him, and right there is where the nonsense begins. (I don’t mean to be callous here, as her pain must have been immense, but she uses it to promote woo in a widely-read paper.)

I grieved for months, and in the spring I discovered the TV show Long Island Medium. I became completely mesmerized and decided that I needed to find my own psychic medium, hoping that someone could make a connection to Dave.

I went to see a psychic in Calgary who has a good record of helping law enforcement agencies from around the world locate missing and murdered persons.

And here’s how the psychic convinced her of an afterlife. (Note that Bohlken could have given the psychic her name when making an appointment, which would also allow some preliminary investigation.)

Patricia started the reading by trying to identify the different spirits that had walked in with me. She described one of my grandfathers perfectly, but she also said he was talking about somebody else who was there, someone that was missing the tip of a finger. I didn’t know of anyone that was missing any fingertips. (Later, I learned that my other grandfather had lost the tip of two fingers in a lawnmower accident. He died when I was a baby, so I didn’t remember him at all.) This was one of 50 validations of my life that she could never possibly have known.

Patricia sensed that there was somebody else in the room but the spirit was “wispy,” unlike my grandfather who was strongly present. After several minutes, she asked me if someone had died recently. [JAC: She’s a psychic—she should have known that!] When I told her that my boyfriend had died six months earlier, she exclaimed: “In the first year, it’s darn near impossible to reach them, but I will try because he is here.”

“He can hear you,” Patricia said. “It’s almost like he comes to you gently because you were very angry with him when he left.” She told me stories for almost an hour, telling me things that she could never possibly have known. She described how Dave would sit across from me at the kitchen island. How when I was at the kitchen sink, he would wrap his arms around me from behind. “He’s still doing that.”

She explained that “if you even think of them, it’s … like picking up the phone or having him right in front of you. If you know what you feel like, you’ll know what somebody else’s energy feels like.”

Presumably Ms. Bohlken has never heard of “cold readings“, in which experienced “readers” can make remarkably accurate guesses by noticing subtle expressions and body language, and knowing a few things about the subject. Note as well that Bohlken had a very strong will to believe, which would make her fixate on the information that was accurate and ignore the stuff that was wrong.

There would be ways to test these paranormal activities, like the strictures put into place by James Randi in his famous One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, but no psychic ever accepted the challenge (at least two agreed to, but then backed out). I’m sure Randi could have designed a test to see if this medium could, without hints or prompting, tell things about the deceased she couldn’t possibly have known. Penn and Teller could do so as well. I could try, but magicians are much better at this than are scientists, who don’t know all the tricks.

And here’s the kicker that cemented Bohlken’s belief in the afterlife.

. . . About a week after the reading, I noticed a tingling sensation on the right side of my head when I thought of Dave – as if my hair was standing on edge, this ebbed and flowed depending on the intensity of my emotions. When my mom died suddenly a year later, I was more open to the sensation and I felt her energy differently, and immediately.

“More open to the sensation,” eh? And now Bohlken is about to foist this on the world, making credulous people even more woo-prone:

Patricia left me with a parting thought to consider once my grief had subsided. “It’s almost like you wanted to write a book, and now you have the material,” she noted.

Writing a book was not something I had ever considered, but after my experience, sharing my story is something that I simply have to do.

People want to believe this stuff, of course; who wouldn’t like to live on, or get a message that their friends, family, and beloved are out there somewhere thinking of you?

And, after all, what harm is done by making people think that? The harm is twofold. First, the psychic took money (probably a not insubstantial sum) from Bohlken. The amount spent yearly on “psychic services” in the U.S. is about $2.2 billion, or about $670 for every citizen. Twenty-two percent of Americans have consulted a psychic (that means that those who have pay about $3,000 for the consultations), and 34% believe they’ve had a psychic episode. This is, pure and simple, victimization of the vulnerable.

Second, essays like the one above merely buttress this kind of scam, and also weaken people’s organs of reason. This is exactly what religion does, but of course “psychic services” are just one form of religion.

h/t: Christopher

NYT column to explore the meaning of death, but only with religious scholars

February 3, 2020 • 12:15 pm

George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, is obsessed with death—particularly his own. And I can understand, for I too share the existential dread he describes as a “shudder”. In the piece below, an introduction to a series of upcoming interviews that Yancy will conduct for the New York Times, he reveals his angst:

The fact of death is like a haunting. It frequents me, entangled in everything I do: It’s just beneath my pillow as I sleep, strolling next to me as I casually walk from one class to the next, inserting its presence between each heart beat in my chest, forcing its way into my consciousness when I say “I love you” to my children each night, assuring me that it can unravel the many promises that I continue to make, threatening the appointments that I need to keep. This sense of haunting is what the Harvard professor Cornel West calls the “death shudder.” Of this “shudder” in the face of death, he writes, “Yes, dread and terror were involved, but also perplexity. Exploration. Where does nonexistence take you? What does it mean to be stripped of your own consciousness? How do we live with the idea that we are always tantalizingly close to death? At any moment the bridge can collapse.”

I continue to shudder. Yet there is something about facing the fact of death that invites us to double back, to see our existence, our lives, differently.

Sometimes I think this dread is an especially Jewish trait, though Yancey isn’t Jewish. But Woody Allen is, and has repeatedly and eloquently expressed not only his fear of extinction, but how it renders everything meaningless, a meaninglessness that he thinks artists should counteract (see video here). Christopher Hitchens’s view of death, which haunts me, is this one, expressed in his memoir Hitch-22:

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.)

I too want to stick around and see what happens! But I don’t share Hitchens’s fear of eternal life, so long as it’s on Earth. For after he said the above, he added this:

Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”

It’s worthwhile thinking about our extinction, though I’m more liable to be rendered depressed by such cogitation instead of grasping, as many do, the fragility and ephemerality of life and embracing a joy at still being alive. So be it.

What I’m kvetching about with Yancy’s column is that he’s going to explore the idea of death only with religious scholars. The intro says this:

This essay is an introduction to a series of monthly interviews to be conducted by the author with 12 religious scholars and practitioners on how individual religious traditions understand and respond to the inevitability of death.

At the end he notes this:

It is in this spirit of exploration that I will interview 12 deeply knowledgeable scholars, philosophers and teachers, one each month, about the meaning of death in their respective traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Jainism and others. I will be asking questions like: What is death? Why do we fear death? Is death final? Do we have immortal souls? What role does death play in how we ought to live our lives?

The objective is not to find definitive answers to these eternal questions, but to engage, as my students and I try to do in our classes, in a lively discussion about a fact that most of us would rather avoid, and move ourselves a little closer to the truth.

It looks, then, that only those with “faith traditions” are going to be interviewed. Now why on earth is that? There are plenty of secular philosophers and scholars who have dealt with the idea of one’s death, and dealt with it honestly, not having in one’s “tradition” the false idea of an eternal life—or the possibility of reincarnation as a higher or lower being. The secular tradition begins with the ancient Greeks and continues right up to the atheistic philosophers of today. A well known survey by Bourget and Chalmers showed that 73% of professional philosophers are atheists, with only 15% being theists. Why do theistic or “other” philosophers get a say here rather than the 3 out of 4 who are nonbelievers? I have no idea.

If you’re going to explore death, you must—absolutely must—explore it as it is: the end of our consciousness and existence, with no evidence of an afterlife. Yancy is missing a big opportunity here.

 

The poignant words of a dying woman

December 7, 2019 • 1:30 pm

This is a somber read for a Saturday, and it’s supposed to be my “day off,” which means I work for 6 hours instead of nine. When I finish this, I’m going to take a long walk, though I won’t see any penguins. But I’ll be thinking of Josie Rubio on the way.

Rubio was a writer and editor who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma six years ago. During her remaining years of life—she died four days ago at 42—she wrote prolifically on her website A Pain in the Neck, discussing her disease, its metastasis into neuroendocrine tumors, her suffering, her attempts to find a boyfriend, and her attitude, which was often surprisingly upbeat and always worth a read.  Her New York Times obituary, if it can be called that, is below, which includes some links to her published work about trying to find love at the same time she was dying.

Here’s perhaps her most famous piece (below), which, as the obituary above notes:

The online version of Ms. Rubio’s article, published on Aug. 24, garnered more than 225,000 page views; it appeared in print the next day in the Sunday Review section. That same weekend she learned that her prognosis was grimmer than she had thought.

“Instead of sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, I read a lot of really nice and encouraging emails” from her essay’s readers, Ms. Rubio wrote in a blog post soon afterward. “It sounds like dating sites are going to be inundated with cancer patients now. Good. Feel free to use my opening line.”

The opening lines grab you:

One night, as a friend and I were headed to a bar to see someone I had met on a dating app, she asked, “What do you tell these guys?” I pulled up my profile and handed her my phone.

“I have cancer so if you want to hang out, act now!” reads the first line.

“This is great,” she said with a laugh.

After her diagnosis, Rubio was ditched by her boyfriend of twelve years but, after pondering what to do, swallowed her pride and her knowledge that she was terminal, and dived into an online dating pool.  And she finally found love—with the the guy who was by her side when she died just a few days ago:

The guy who made me break some of my rules made me shatter more. I found myself, at his insistence, reluctantly and badly dancing, but laughing the entire time. I’ve held his hand across restaurant tables. I steal kisses from him in public. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself anymore.

I’m so happy and so sad at the same time.

Death isn’t an abstract concept. I live week to week, moment to moment. I live fully, but I have always done that. Since the new treatment, I can even walk around sometimes not thinking about cancer. I agree with my ex: It’s nice. Since that first 1992 date, I just wanted to find someone and feel like that part of my life was settled. But from ages 28 to 40, I just settled. Period.

When my ex kissed me goodbye on the day we broke up, I thought, “This will be the last time a man kisses me.”

It finally feels good to be wrong about something.

These pieces will make you weep, as will the words she wrote in the next-to-last post on her website (click on screenshot below), when she found that her cancer had spread massively through her body, that her death was imminent, and she would have to go to a hospice:

Josie was also a cat lover, as you can tell from the banner of her website (above).

In the end, my heart will stop, but it feels broken now. I don’t want to leave the cats. I don’t want to leave my boyfriend. I don’t want to leave my mom. I don’t want to leave my friends. This is very different than how I felt in May of 2018, when my boyfriend at the time wanted me to die so he could be with his Pilates instructor in London (it worked out for him in the end even though I didn’t die then). Then I didn’t care whether I lived or died because I felt broken. This time, I don’t want to go, and I know that makes me much luckier. My life is so much better than the way it was.

My friends decorated by room with photos. I’ve had a good life. I can’t comprehend that it’s going to stop so soon. How did this happen?

. . . I’ve received countless messages of love.

I asked my boyfriend what he thought happens after we die. He says you live on in other people’s memories, and I won’t be forgotten.

Still, the end looms close, and I feel like I’m not ready.

The final entry on Josie’s website, below, is given its entirety, and was posted after she died.

 

Here’s her image from her Twitter page, which had its last entry on November 21.

And one more photo.

YouTube has an interview with her before she was diagnosed with cancer.

If I’ve made you sad today, I’m sorry. But I hope I’ve also made you want to live more fully. As an old friend of mine used to say when talking of life, “Squeeze that lemon!”

al-Baghdadi finally meets his end

October 27, 2019 • 1:30 pm

As many sites have reported (the NYT is one), ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 48, was hunted down by U.S. special forces and killed (or rather, committed suicide). He detonated a suicide belt, taking three of his children with him. As the NYT reports,

“Last night, the United States brought the world’s No. 1 terrorist leader to justice,” Mr. Trump said in an unusual nationally televised address from the White House. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead.”

Mr. Trump said Mr. al-Baghdadi was chased to the end of a tunnel, “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way” as he was pursued by American military dogs. Accompanied by three children, Mr. al-Baghdadi then detonated a suicide vest, blowing up himself and the children, Mr. Trump said.

I can’t say I’m unhappy that he’s gone. Although I’m a pacifist, and would prefer that he be captured and tried, he was also an enemy. But I see Trump’s gloating as unseemly for several reasons.

1.) al-Baghdadi did not die “like a dog”: that is offensive to dogs. What does that mean, anyway? In fact, the only U.S. injury in the operation was a wounded U.S. attack dog. That dog was a hero and should be honored. Further, how many dogs would take their puppies with them?

2.) Is it really cowardly to blow yourself up? Perhaps “whimpering and screaming and crying” is cowardly, but suicide as an alternative to capture is not something I consider cowardly. If al-Baghdadi is a coward, so was Chilean President Salvador Allende, a socialist who did a lot for his country, but killed himself in a coup (engineered by the Chilean military and the CIA) as the military approached the Presidential Palace. After giving a final radio address, Allende killed himself with an AK-47. Was that cowardly? I think not.

3.) Finally, the credit for the al-Baghdadi operation should go primarily to the U.S. military. Trump, as Obama did with bin Laden, simply gave the go-ahead. But Trump is going to be trump-eting this as evidence for his “stable genius” until the next election. Compare the President’s gloating and swaggering now with the low-key way that Obama announced the death of bin Laden.

Tennessee electrocutes convicted killer

August 19, 2019 • 9:00 am

From the Nashville Scene we learn that there’s just been an execution in Tennessee (why is it always the Red States that execute people?). The details are given in this article in The Nashville Scene (click on screenshot):

The details are horrific, and nobody claims that Stephen West is completely innocent. He did have an accomplice, however, and claims that he was incited by the accomplice. But the crime, in which both killers were found complicit, was horrifying:

Stephen West has been executed in the electric chair 33 years after he was sentenced to death for the 1986 murders of Wanda Romines, 51, and her 15-year-old daughter, Sheila, near Knoxville. West, who suffered from severe mental illness, was also convicted of raping the teen, and while he confessed to that crime he maintained that his accomplice stabbed the mother and daughter to death.

The curtains opened at 7:15 on Thursday night, revealing West, who appeared to be crying, sitting in the electric chair. Warden Tony Mays asked West if he had any last words. He responded by referencing scripture.

“In the beginning, God created man,” said West, pausing as he continued to weep. “And Jesus wept. That’s all.”

After West’s final statement, members of the execution team fastened a helmet to his head and placed a shroud over his face. At 7:19, West’s body jolted upward from the chair as the first current of electricity was administered. His body returned to the chair for a matter of seconds, before rising once again with a second jolt of electricity.

West was pronounced dead at 7:27 p.m.

Give the nature of the stab wounds, it’s likely that the killing was prolonged, with some of the wounds meant to torture rather than kill. The lawyers asked for clemency, and two jurors recommended it since West appears to have been mentally ill, but that didn’t stop the electrocution.

In West’s petition for clemency, his attorneys write that then-17-year-old Ronnie Martin had tried to date Sheila Romines and was humiliated when she rejected him. They say Martin coerced West, who was 23 years old at the time, to rape Sheila before Martin stabbed the women to death. The attorneys also note that West was tried first, and that his jury never heard a tape recording of Martin admitting that he was the one who had killed the two victims. They also write that Martin threatened to have West and his then-pregnant wife killed if West didn’t keep quiet about the crimes. Martin ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and is currently serving a life sentence.

Two of the surviving jurors from West’s trial, both of whom had originally voted for the death sentence, told his attorneys they supported clemency in his case. Gov. Bill Lee announced Wednesday afternoon that he would not stop the execution.

There’s a forceful plea to end state-mandated executions in today’s New York Times written by Margaret Renkel:

Her Biblical “Thou shalt not kill” argument, which is simply a diktat without supporting arguments, doesn’t move me as much as other arguments, some of which she makes as well:

There is nothing about Mr. West’s case that would move staunch supporters of the death penalty to rethink their position, but the reasons for ending state-sanctioned murder are manifold: It fails to deter crime; it is far more expensive than life in prison without parole; it is racially biased. Perhaps most tellingly, death sentences are too often dealt to innocent people. Any one of those reasons, by itself, makes a compelling argument for ending executions altogether.

The death sentences given to innocent people is perhaps the most powerful of these arguments. You might say, “Well, we’ll give the death penalty only to people who confess, or whose guilt is absolutely certain,” but confessions can be false, and too often convictions and sentences are based on fallacious eyewitness evidence. But even beyond that, Renkl is right. The death penalty is not a deterrent, it costs more (given the lengthy appeal process) than life without parole, and (Renkl doesn’t mention this), life without parole effectively sequesters the criminal from society forever, so he poses no more danger.

Further, some cases killers can actually be rehabilitated and reformed, and in such cases, however rare, why should they be killed, or even stay in prison forever? There’s some suggestion that West might have been at least partly rehabilitated:

People who knew Mr. West said he had become a different man, and isn’t true rehabilitation justification enough for commuting his sentence to life without parole? As Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty tweeted a few days before the execution, “When an inmate’s severe mental illness is undisputed by the state’s own doctors, what does it take to show that life without parole is the appropriate sentence?”

Remember that even convicted killers like Anders Breivik in Norway, who killed 77 people, get a maximum sentence of only 21 years, and then are reviewed to see if they’ve changed enough to mandate parole.

Further, West appears to have been mentally ill, perhaps severely. That may have contributed to his crime. If he couldn’t help himself (and, in fact, no criminals can), what is achieved by punishment that is certainly retributive? Retributive punishment for crimes that were inevitable—for which the criminal had no choice—makes little sense to me. Yes, it may satisfy the blood lust of the victims’ friends and family, but that caters to our lowest and most primitive emotions.

From the Nashville Scene:

Prison officials have been treating West for severe mental illness for years, giving him powerful antipsychotic drugs that one psychiatrist described in a court filing as “chemical straitjackets.” In an extensive 2002 psychiatric evaluation, Dr. Richard Dudley writes that, in his opinion, West “was suffering from a mental disorder” at the time of the killings that sent him to death row. Dudley also says West’s “mental disorder was of the type that would have been relevant to his defense during the guilt phase of his trial and also relevant as mitigation during the penalty phase of his trial.” West’s mental health was not discussed during his trial.

I should add that electrocution is a particularly barbaric way to kill someone. Yes, if West did torture, rape, and stab the women, his own killings were far more barbaric. But do we have to be as inhumane as those we execute?

Here are some data that Renkl links to in her piece:

Public opinion in the U.S. appears to be against the death penalty:

Finally, out of all the First World countries on the planet, only the U.S. and Japan have the death penalty and use it (figure from Wikipedia):

Is it possible that all of Europe, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Colombia, and many other countries don’t see something that America does? Possibly, but I highly doubt it. We won’t regulate guns, and we execute people. Both bespeak a primitive mentality that needs to be changed.