In recent years we have been flooded with predictions about the ways in which we humans are reaching towards immortality, eventually becoming Homo Deus. Whether with the aid of computers that will store our minds even as the rest of us dies. Or with all sorts of new drugs and nannomachinery in our bloodstream. Or simply by having life expectancy increase by more than one year, each year.

Perhaps so. However, making such predictions is not what I am after here. Instead, let’s turn things the other way around. Suppose the Reaper is not going to be pushed out of the way. In that case, what other cardinal elements of life are going to stay more or less as they are?

Death brings two contradictory gifts. On one hand, it is the one thing in life that is even more certain than taxes. On the other, since we do not know when we are going to die, it makes life, as long as we have it, precarious. Even for those who, having admitted their guilt, are now on death row, unexpected things sometimes happen and hope dies last. Perhaps some kind of stay of execution would be issued, or an amnesty granted. Probably there have been few if any convicted persons who did not hope for a reprieve at the last moment. As, according to Herodotus, happened to King Croesus of Lydia. He was already bound to the stake when his executioner, King Cyrus of Persia, hearing him cry Solon! Solon! was overcome by curiosity and ordered him released so he could explain himself. Or the previous execution would be botched, leading to an investigation and a corresponding delay during which anything might happen. Or perhaps the prison in which they are held will be destroyed by an earthquake. Perhaps.

Both in- and outside of prison, it is this ignorance that makes life precarious. Young or old, is there anyone who can be certain that, leaving the home, he’ll return in one piece? Or that he’ll wake up next day and see the sun? It is also what makes it precious and endows it with a certain tang; one a thousand times stronger than, but perhaps not quite unlike, the kind that relish adds to many dishes. “What is food without salt? What is more tasteless than the white of an egg?” asked Job. Depending on circumstances as well as personality, some people may enjoy the tang as much as anything in life. At least for a time. “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight/Nor public man, nor cheering crowds/A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds” wrote William Butler Yeats. Or as Siegfried Sassoon, the World War I English pacifist poet, told his family, the first days of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest ones in the whole of British military history, were “great fun.”

However, most of the time most people hate death, fear it, and try to push it as far away as they can. Either they do so by taking all sorts of precautions hundreds of which keep being listed on the Net every day. Or by pretending that it is of no account, as the Stoics did, or simply by refusing to think about it. Others still—probably the majority—vacillate between one extreme and the other. Most of the time we seek nothing more than a stable existence in which there is no threat. On occasion, though, a great many of us long for its opposite and make ready to confront it. “The strenuous life,” as Teddy Roosevelt called it, would not be worthy of the name had it not been accompanied by a whiff, perhaps more than a whiff, of danger. However we feel about it and try to cope with it, the precariousness that is the product of death is always there, inevitably and inescapably.

But that is only part of the story. While death makes life precarious, it also provides us with a kind of ballast, or keel, or compass. As it did to Don Quixote; reaching the end of a lifetime of delusions during which he fearlessly acted out an imaginary code of chivalry, he was brought back to his senses by the realization that death, his death, was both inevitable and imminent. And as it did to his real-life counterpart, Ignacio Loyola, who started life as a swashbuckling soldier and violent criminal but repented after being badly wounded and became the founder of the Jesuit Order. These and countless other examples seem to show that, but for death and our fear of it, we would have been capable of going to even greater extremes of folly than we actually are. We could, and probably would, have gone stark raving mad; with the unbearable lightness of being, if nothing else.

As many scholars have tried to explain the origins of religion as there are ants in a nest. Starting as long ago as Epicurus around 300 BCE, though, few of those scholars who did not allot death an important place among the factors involved. The ways various religions have dealt with death vary enormously. Some, notably those of ancient Greece and Rome, did not care whether, as long as people were alive, they were or were not virtuous, promising everyone the same dismal fate. But probably the majority prescribed all kinds of ways to prepare for death, either promising rewards to those who had behaved themselves or purification and/or punishment to those who had not. There is, indeed, a sense in which a religion which simply allows its adherents to pass away without bothering to tell them what may come next is not a religion at all. Either it is a philosophy, as skepticism was and Confucianism still is. Or else an ideology; as in the joke about the woman who, come her thirty-fifth birthday, returned her membership card in the Social-Democratic Party because she found out that its program had nothing to say about what would happen to her after she died.

One way or another, the sturdy child of death is religion. Facing what they believe were going to be the last moments of their lives, even stout atheists have been known to pray, sacrifice, make vows, and the like. Furthermore, today in most Western societies religion occupies a place of its own more or less carefully differentiated from all the reset. Not so in many, perhaps most, societies throughout history. In them the dividing line between secular and religious life hardly existed. Embedded in the former, so to speak, the latter often came close to forming the sum total of culture. Every institution, every move, however trivial, had to be approved by the religious authorities that be. Among orthodox Jews, such is the case right down to the present day. Thus human culture itself is, to a considerable extent, the product of death and awareness of it. Including architecture—from the pyramids down—painting, sculpture, musical and literary opuses, all kinds of symbolism and ritual—most secular rituals are modelled on religious ones—and what not.

As long as we live, the threat of death can cause us to draw more closely together. The outcome is a kind of intense solidarity hard for those who have not experienced it to comprehend. Here is what one very experienced fifteenth-century commander, Jean de Beuil, had to say about it in the Jouvencel: “You love your comrade so much in war…. And then you prepare to go and live or die with him and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such delectation that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight is.” Similar sentiments permeate modern works such as Ernst Junger’s Im Stahlgewitter (In the Storm of Steel), to mention but one. That is not to say there are no limits. Too great and too imminent a threat of death is likely to lead to the cry of sauve qui peut at best and to a desperate struggle of all against all at worst. The kind of struggle that often breaks out when a building goes up in flames, trapping the men and women inside. The less cohesive and disciplined the unit or society, the more likely this is to happen. One may certainly exult over the death of an enemy, and indeed history knows of innumerable cases of this kind. What a delight, as happened to King Hezekiah of Judea in 701 BCE, to wake up in the morning and find 85,000 enemy soldiers, who were just about to capture one’s capital city, dead! And how wonderful, as soldiers of all times and places are known to have done, to cut off their extremities, mutilate them, and put them on show for the edification of friend and foe alike! As these and countless other examples prove, one thing the presence of death may do is to cause us to get used to it and grow callous. “Hard-bitten,” as the saying goes. It may also make us do terrible things which, but for it, we would never have thought about. Much of the time, though, death is accompanied by feelings of horror, pain, sorrow, regret, mourning and grief. Attitudes some of which we may have taken over from the members of some other species and which, whether or not that is the case, unquestionably form an essential part of what it means to be human.

It is pain and sorrow, too, which have led us towards empathy, compassion and remorse. Empathy and compassion for the dead and those whom they have left behind. Remorse for all the things we could have done for our dead but which, whether through malice or neglect, we did not. All these phenomena are among the quintessential characteristics of our lives, almost certainly as prevalent in prehistoric times as they are today. And none that could have existed, or could only have existed in very different, all but unimaginable, form, if it had not been for death. Whether a life without all of them would be human is moot—it may, indeed, not even be life at all.

But don’t worry. Long as our life expectancy has become, the flaming swords remain in place, guarding the gates of paradise and preventing us from eating the forbidden fruit. The reaper is there, waiting for each and every one of us. And pace Ray Kurzweil and other “transhumanists,” there is no way he is about to let us go.