The Search for Extra-Solar Relig
Extraterrestrial Afterlives
The view of the afterlife held on other planets is a difficult topic for students of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. An approach is available, however, by considering one of the fundamental characteristics of such a civilization. That is, its lifetime. Elsewhere I have argued that extraterrestrial civilizations must last for hundreds of thousands of years if they are to communicate with each other and become members of a Galaxy-wide community. To achieve such longevity, each must have realized a stable social structure. Such civilizations are therefore likely to adopt a global ecumenical spirituality that removes the instability caused by warring religions. This implies a uniform view of the afterlife to avoid doctrinal conflicts that lead to violence. One can also say that theories of the afterlife that reward violence are unlikely to survive in a society stable over thousands of centuries.
On Earth, we are far from having a unified view of the afterlife. Consider the differing accounts by the Abrahamic religions of the death and subsequent fate of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity preaches that Jesus died as a result of crucifixion, rising to Heaven to sit with the Christian God. Islam holds that Jesus survived crucifixion and went to live in a region that sounds much like Kashmir, ultimately dying and joining other prophets in Allah’s Paradise. The Babylonian Talmud records that Jesus was stoned and hanged for blasphemy, and is now in Hell, up to his neck in boiling excrement. Clearly, this scale of contradiction can be the source of religious persecution, social strife, and instability within a civilization, as well as a cause for armed conflicts between civilizations.
These examples indicate the need to reach a consensus on the afterlife if a planetary civilization is to achieve long-term stability. They also indicate that there is the problem of determining the veracity of one view compared with another, otherwise the contradictions would have been resolved long ago. On Earth, there is an absence of verifiable data available from the afterlife, and careful double-blind experiments appear to out of the question. It is likely that a similar problem exists on extraterrestrial planets. In such a situation, the civilization may well turn to imagination and its peculiar logic. Identifying how an extraterrestrial civilization views the afterlife may therefore depend on forecasting acts of imagination.
On Earth, Neolithic burials suggest that death was initially imagined to be a transition to a region much like the world of the living, requiring food, drink, weapons and valuables. This view was elaborated in ancient Egypt into a complex journey for the dead. Guidance through the hazards to be expected and interrogations to be passed was available in the Book of the Dead. This became essential reading for end-of-life planning. The obvious riot of unrestrained imagination led to reaction in other religions, which moved in the opposite direction, yielding a concept of the afterlife as utterly empty. Since then, afterlives of various degree of complexity have returned again.
In providing complete idiots with a summary of afterlives currently envisioned by established religions, Diane Ahlquist describes the different views of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, and Taoism. The reincarnations occurring in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism leave little time for development of a robust afterlife, as the spirits of the dead hurry on to their next appointment on Earth. By merit-worthy acts on Earth they seek to break out of the circle of reincarnation and reach a state of Nirvana, providing eternal bliss free from desire and delusion – an afterlife otherwise free of content.
Christian afterlives vary among different sects, who apparently do not mingle after death. Always present are Heaven, providing eternal life and bliss, and Hell, providing ordeals by fire and torture, as well as eternal damnation. Heaven is reserved for the true believers of the dogma of the particular sect. Hell is for sinners. However, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross saved all who faced eternal damnation, provided they repent their sinful deeds. (The possible extension of this clemency to other planets is discussed elsewhere.) Delays in rendering final judgment are anticipated in some cases. Roman Catholics may require additional cleansing of their sins in Purgatory.
The Muslim afterlife also has a Heaven and Hell, to which the soul is sent for eternity after final judgment is rendered. Before this, however, the destination is Barzakh, where a sinner can anticipate torment by Chastisement of the Tomb until Judgment Day. Heaven is a paradise with lush gardens and an underground river.
After this review of conventional afterlives, Ahlquist provides us with her example of modern imagination. ‘In the next life, you never have a bad hair day. And gentlemen, any hair you’ve lost comes back. Guys don’t have to shave and women never worry about waxing. All you do is think about the hairstyle you want and it appears! . . . It may sound like I’m making light of a serious transition, but this is not about humor. People who have had near-death experiences (see Chapter 7) say they’ve seen civilizations that are akin to Earth, but better. The spirits in these civilizations are all what we would call “the beautiful people” here on Earth—in other words, they are as close to perfect as you can imagine. I have an idea that we’ll all be looking like we’re on the cosmic red carpet at the Universal Awards.’
A more wide ranging description of alternative afterlives for the Twenty First Century is provided in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, who warns that any resemblance in his book to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental. (This caution appears to be absent in most other descriptions.) In his roundup of imaginative possibilities, Eagleman provides us, by my count, with 38 new forms of the afterlife. In the course of this, he introduces us to 26 new gods, 18 new forms of judgment, 15 new heavens, and 23 new hells. It is interesting that imaginary hells always seem to outnumber imaginary heavens. In one of the hells are 31 sad terrestrial gods, abandoned by their worshippers. While Eagleman makes the conventional assumption that an afterlife follows death in most cases, he suggests that there may be 13 additional forms of death in the afterlife itself.
These are tales of the afterlife from a contemporary viewpoint. We are not encountering the speculations of early tribes ignorant of the terrestrial sphere, of the celestial mechanics of the solar system and the Galaxy, of the majesty of a universe containing billions of galaxies, or of human biology and evolution. Instead, we have an imagination that is fully aware of the complexity of the natural world, quantum mechanics, neuroscience, advanced computation and simulation, and of the possibility of alternative universes.
In the face to this effusive display of possible afterlives on Earth or thereabouts, there would appear to be an even wider range of possibilities for older planetary civilizations, who have had much longer to exercise their own imaginations. There is the additional difficulty of knowing what form a belief in the existence of a life after death might take in the face of further developments in science in an advanced civilization. On Earth, forecasts of future developments in computers and artificial intelligence, and in biology and medicine, are already raising disturbing questions about future afterlives.
Ray Kurtzweil, for example, predicts that by mid century the power of computers combined with artificial intelligence will exceed the total human brain power available on Earth. With the resources available at this technological singularity, he argues, it will be possible to transfer the total information within a person’s brain into a computer, allowing the individual’s personality and mental experience to exist after the person’s body has died. This computerized immortality offers a new alternative to those offered by religions.
Eagleman, in fact lists it in one of his tales from the afterlives: entrepreneurs offer the promise of a fantasy-filled machine afterlife as the ultimate in end-of life planning. Unfortunately, in Eagleman’s story, when those buying into this offer die, they find themselves spirited off to a standard heaven with clouds, togas and harps, with no jetpacks and no prospect of fulfillment of their fondest fantasies. Instead, they face an irritated God who has gone to a great deal of trouble to create His own idea of an afterlife and is not going to have it usurped by machines. He is also deeply disturbed by their belief in an afterlife offered by computer salesmen when they did not believe in one offered by Himself.
Futurists on Earth also point to the rapid strides in medicine in extending life, and in particular to the future potential for regenerative medicine to replace diseased or aging organs. Ultimately this promises a regenerative immortality, removing the prospect of an afterlife and its potential perils. But immortality is not necessarily a good thing. In one of Eagleman’s tales, God, existing in eternity, has pursued happiness as we do but through the millennia has become bored and embittered with existence and the repetitions that occur in never-ending time. He therefore sentences sinners to eternity, so that they can suffer along with him. For the good, death is the end of all things.
There are arguments for not living forever. Situations inevitably repeat and the tedium of enduring endless repetition is likely to make individuals seek their own quietus. Even the experience of travelling in a life-support container among star systems for endless millennia will probably pall. Interestingly, a repeated theme that occurs in Sum is that humans, and some gods, are seeking answers to the questions Why are we here? What is the purpose of our existence? These questions will occur in advanced civilizations, since it is the possession of enquiring minds that have led to their advance. Once the questions are answered some of the incentive for extending life may be reduced. The same may true if the conclusion is reached that there is no answer.
Either way it is likely that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations will have reached an understanding of the limits of regeneration and settled for some average life span, longer than ours, but not infinite. They therefore will have the opportunity to form a view of what constitutes an afterlife. In doing so, they will be making use of knowledge of science that surpasses ours. Furthermore, it is likely that an understanding of basic scientific laws will have permeated the thought of the civilization. We do not know how these laws will be supplemented in the future, but we can assume that those evidently governing the universe will remain.
The laws of thermodynamics will remain; energy will continue to be conserved in a closed system and entropy will increase. The view that information is in some way the opposite of entropy will still be held. An egg on a table is full of information about its structure and the processes underway that lead to emergence of a new organism. Entropy, as chaos or disorder, is at a minimum. If the egg crashes to the floor, it becomes highly disordered, information is destroyed, entropy is hugely increased, and heat is lost. The process is irreversible. The regeneration of the information in the egg will require energy.
Information will be recognized as communicated via physical changes of state, such as the pressure fluctuations of the atmosphere in speech, the rearrangement of molecules and tissue in the egg, or the alternatives of on and off in neural or electronic digital communication. Such changes of state require energy. Just as energy leaks away into a lower unrecoverable state as entropy increases, so energy has to go into communication when information is generated. Because the universe runs down to an ultimate state of disorder entropy is related to the probability of state. Conversely, information is related to the improbability of state. Processing information requires energy to change the probabilities away from the noise and disorder occurring when entropy rules. If there is any communication, recognition, or action in the afterlife--anything that involves information--it requires energy.
And, of course, energy is what is missing in the afterlife. Metabolism, which creates the energy essential to generate the information in our communications, memories, perceptions, and actions, is gone. That is what death does. It terminates metabolism, cutting off the energy supply for the cells in the body. Thus a scientific view of the afterlife is one in which absence of energy means there is no information, not even for recognizing a bad hair day or the errors of computer salesmen. We can envisage the concept an advanced civilization will have of the afterlife as one suffused with emptiness. A form of Nirvana, yes, with freedom from care and desire.
References
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Life after Death, by Diane Ahlquist. The Penguin Group, New York, 2007.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleton. Pantheon Books, New York, 2009.