Spoiling my news feed this morning was a New York Times article: “In Switzerland, Reported Use of Suicide Capsule Inflames Debate.” I’ll admit that I’m a bit numb to the frequent news of assisted suicide advances made by “right to die” advocates, but somehow this one caught my attention.

The accompanying photo reveals a futuristic, sci-fi-inspired pod or capsule called “Sarco” (think “sarcophagus,” literally from the Greek “flesh-eating”) which is designed to allow its victim to enter on his or her own accord (or with some friendly reassurance, I can only imagine) and then to press an internal button which replaces the oxygen with fatal nitrogen gas.

Still unsettled, my eye was drawn to a quote from the late Carl Sagan printed prominently across the capsule:

We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

It checks out, I realized — if life is nothing more than material or “stuff,” derived from the impersonal stars, why not allow people to voluntarily recycle themselves when they feel their useful lifespan — like a plastic grocery bag — has come to an end? 

A 64-year-old American woman suffering from an autoimmune condition, I’ve now read in Wesley J. Smith’s article, has just become the first to follow Sagan’s reasoning into the Sarco.

Materialist science communicators may be revered as the unprejudiced truth-sayers of our time, but their proverbs — popularized in shows like the Cosmos TV series (where Sagan’s quote originated) — lay the foundation for the most disturbing affairs.

Would Sagan object? Well, during his lifetime, in an article with his wife in Parade magazine, he explicitly cited embryonic recapitulation (à la Darwin disciple Ernst Haeckel) as a justification for abortion. So, it wouldn’t be altogether shocking if he would have embraced this view as well. See John West’s book Darwin Day in America, pp. 329-330.