Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia

The pie is increasing in size, so everyone gets a bigger slice, but when the rich’s already bigger slice increases in size, the relative amount of wealth accumulates more on the upper end, making the incomes of those in the middle and bottom feel smaller.

There is no period in history when it would have been better to be alive than today. People who fantasise about a romantic past imagine themselves living in Pharaoh’s court, Caesar’s palace, Plato’s athenaeum, a medieval knight’s manor, a king’s castle, a queen’s château, an emperor’s citadel, a cardinal’s cathedral. But the cold, hard reality is that 99.99 per cent of all the people who ever lived existed in what we would today consider squalid poverty.

Most conservatives today are more liberal than most liberals were in the 1950s.

If I make $100,000 a year and Elon Musk makes $100,000,000 a year and we both see a doubling of our incomes, while I should be thrilled at my newfound fortune of $200,000, if I compare it to Musk’s massive $200,000,000, that comparative difference may feel worse, even though I’m better off and no one is worse off for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s fortune.

As the belletrist extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens once told me, mastering the pen and the podium means never having to dine or sleep alone.

highly secularised countries like Sweden and Denmark, where rates of religiosity are among the lowest in the world, seem not to have much death anxiety at all,

Another day in Turkey without a coup goes unreported, but just try to take over that country without the world’s media covering it, along with millions of smartphone-carrying citizens video recording every incident

as we age, (1) we take on more responsibilities, so we have a greater cognitive burden, (2) we become more vigilant about threats (especially as parents) and more sensitive to errors in youth (‘kids these days!’), (3) while at the same time we lose the capacity to process information as quickly as we did when we were younger, and (4) we tend to attribute these changes in ourselves to changes in the external world.

No doubt the elders of prehistoric tribes thought the younger generation’s cave paintings were not up to the standard they had set.

We are more willing to invest in defending what is already ours than we are to take what is someone else’s, because the motivation to avoid losing what we already have is greater than the motivation of gaining what we don’t yet have.

It makes people believe if we just get back to those principles, like police brutalising and jailing homosexuals, we can be good once again.

Behavioural economists have demonstrated experimentally that in order to get someone to take a gamble or to risk an investment, the potential pay-off must be about twice the potential loss. To get a person to toss a coin to win or lose $10 (students), or $10,000 (wealthy executives), the pay-off has to be greater than or equal to $20, or $20,000.

Economically speaking, even though the poor are getting rich, the rich are getting richer faster, so objective progress feels like relative regress.

In an essay summarizing the results of this research, Baumeister captured what I am trying to convey about the purpose of life, the laws of nature, and the cosmos as it relates to finding meaning, particularly in the context of our search for immortality, the afterlife, and utopia: Meaning is a powerful tool in human life. To understand what that tool is used for, it helps to appreciate something else about life as a process of ongoing change. A living thing might always be in flux, but life cannot be at peace with endless change. Living things yearn for stability, seeking to establish harmonious relationships with their environment. They want to know how to get food, water, shelter and the like. They find or create places where they can rest and be safe … Life, in other words, is change accompanied by a constant striving to slow or stop the process of change, which leads ultimately to death. If only change could stop, especially at some perfect point: that was the theme of the profound story of Faust’s bet with the devil. Faust lost his soul because he could not resist the wish that a wonderful moment would last forever. Such dreams are futile. Life cannot stop changing until it ends.14 That a meaningful, purposeful life comes from struggle and challenge against the vicissitudes of nature more than it does a homeostatic balance of extropic pushback against entropy reinforces the point that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Life. We must act in the world. The thermostat is always being adjusted, balance sought but never achieved. There is no Faustian bargain to be made in life. We may strive for immortality while never reaching it, as we may seek utopian bliss while never finding it, for it is the striving and the seeking that matter, not the attainment of the unattainable. We are volitional beings, so the choice to act is ours, and our sense of purpose is defined by reaching for the upper limits of our natural abilities and learned skills, and by facing challenges with courage and conviction.

In an aptly titled article ‘Two Rights Don’t Make Up for a Wrong’, the authors found that ‘the overall goodness of a person is determined mostly by his worst bad deed.’35 Decades of devoted work for public causes can be obliterated in an instant with an extramarital affair, financial scandal or criminal act.

What about the flip side of the economic ledger – the poor? Even Jesus gave up hope for them and offered only early entrance to heaven.

The ultimate problem of utopian logic begins with a utilitarian calculus in which everyone will live in perfect harmony once we get rid of any dissenters who don’t see as clearly as the collective.

When you have to murder people by the tens of millions to achieve your utopian dream, you have succeeded only in producing a dystopian nightmare.

To experience something, you must be alive, so we cannot personally experience death. Yet we know it is real because every one of the hundred billion people who lived before us is gone. That presents us with something of a paradox.