Dear Magicians,

Most people never get to find out what the world will say about them after they die.

Alfred Nobel did.

And it terrified him.

In 1888, a French newspaper accidentally published Alfred Nobel’s obituary while he was still alive. The headline reportedly described him as “The Merchant of Death,” a man who had become rich by helping people kill one another more efficiently. Imagine opening the morning paper and discovering not only that you’re dead, but that history has already decided who you were. That experience appears to have profoundly affected Nobel and may have helped inspire the creation of the Nobel Prizes themselves.

One of the strangest things about this story is that Nobel left no direct descendants. No wife. No children. Despite the persistent myth that there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics because Nobel’s wife ran off with a mathematician, Alfred Nobel never married. Yet 130 years after his death, thousands of careers, institutions, discoveries, and ambitions still orbit decisions he made with pen and paper. The man had no heirs, but his influence is everywhere.

Last month, Peter Nobel, the great-grandson of Alfred’s brother Ludvig Nobel, died at age 94. Peter spent decades criticizing the Economics Nobel Prize, calling it a “cuckoo’s egg in the Nobel nest” and arguing that it was never part of Alfred Nobel’s original vision. There is something wonderfully ironic about spending years contesting part of the Nobel legacy only to become part of Nobel history yourself.

But Peter Nobel’s death made me think about something else.

Every one of us leaves descendants.

Some leave children.

Others leave ideas.

Nobel left instructions.

Every day you’re writing a set of instructions that will survive you. Your children. Your students. Your books. Your research papers. Your code. Your habits. Your acts of kindness. Your acts of neglect. Something will continue running after you’re gone. The question is what.

Speaking of death, as a practicing astrophysicist, I don’t believe in the tunnel of light, the hovering soul, or the chorus of grieving relatives waiting in some celestial arrivals lounge. But I do believe in one near-death experience that changed the world forever: Alfred Nobel reading his own obituary and deciding he didn’t like the future it predicted – click here to watch it early.

In other news, tomorrow I’ll be interviewing a Nobel Prize-winning economist, my 25th conversation with a Nobel laureate on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. Peter Nobel would probably have mixed feelings about that. What would you like me to ask him?

And before we get to economics, here’s a harder question:

If tomorrow morning you could read a completely honest obituary about yourself, would you change anything about today?

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian