Good post, Crysis. The afterlife as traditionally defined by human religions is a fairy tale with no evidence to back it up except reaching at straws and the occasional bit of anecdotal "evidence." However, for a bit of existential philosophy:
Given an infinite spacetime, there *has to* be an afterlife of some description. Entropy increases over time, but it's never truly irreversible - we live in a fundamentally probabilistic universe where entropy can actually decrease in a closed system, it's just that it's very unlikely, and the more it decreases, the less likely it is. With that in mind, there's nothing stopping the universe from suddenly saying "fuck it, I'm going to recreate you." It might take a googol, googolplex, or Graham's number years, but heat death isn't totally absolute. (What may be absolute is particle decay prohibiting macroscopic objects, or at least meaningful ones, from ever forming, since I don't think it's possible for a particle to "un-decay." I may be wrong on that.) In other words: given an infinite universe, we have infinite Boltzmann brains, and some of them (an infinite amount, in fact) will be you. This also forms the core of the
Omega Point theory, which is something I believe is probable for our posthuman ancestors, if not extremely so.
This gets much worse if we subscribe to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics - which I don't, except as a mathematical framework a la Consistent Histories, but many respected scientists do, so I can't really just dismiss it.
The upshot of all this is that nothing is forever and anything that is possible will happen. You just got to
give it enough time.
---------- Post added at 08:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:12 PM ----------
inb4lock.
Lock here means Lockhart, of course