Talking to a retired physical chemist in my office I asked of his interests outside his specialty.  I was surprised to hear that he was reading avidly and studying the future of humankind. He said, “Time has come for mankind to change to a new form hitherto unknown.” I thought, that’s an odd thing for a dyed in the wool scientist to be saying and asked for clarification. Was he a trans-humanist, did he believe that all humans would be transformed by science into superior cyborgs able to run faster and think better than us? He looked at me quizzically not having the slightest idea what I was talking about. Then he was a religious messianist or did he believe in the Apocalypse? He still had no idea of what I was talking about. Some form of reincarnation then in which we returned to earth totally transformed? Or maybe because of our new knowledge of genetics we would now be starting to turn ourselves into a different kind of biological creature entirely. No, he wasn’t talking about that at all. What then? He explained. “The human body is nothing but a temporary vessel for the soul. In fact all animals are just bodies around souls. The body is the expedient for expression of will. Now very soon humans would find how the soul can exist entirely without a body which at any rate is irrelevant. Okay I thought to myself then he’s just an ordinary Cartesian dualist, and I said nothing, not wanting him to become angry at me.  The point of this short discussion is that it does place in a nutshell just some of the possibilities for solutions regarding life after the demise of the body. The problem is that at any age when you really consider it, you cannot fathom that ultimate blackness, the full demise on oneself. To that end people have constructed elaborate workarounds for the inability to compute the inevitable end one’s own life.

Since it is certain that all of us as individuals will cease to exist in this world and that ultimately even our species that is you manage a has a certain finite life expectancy and moreover so does the solar system and all of the universe. It is not so much that on or anyone else can project the future but more searching for meaning in terms of this realization.t