When I die, I will be gone. period.
People will remember me for a time, then they will die. Before long, no one will remember me. Any mark I ever left on the world will have turned to dust and blown away.
Then, someday, our sun will swell into a red giant, consuming the inner planets, including earth, laying waste to any trace of life in the solar system. And then, unless we've found a way off the planet, any memory of the human race will have been annihilated.
Even if we have mastered interstellar travel and spread to other planets, entropy will have its way with the universe and nothing will remain but pervasive infrared radiation. Unless the universe itself has a memory, there will be no one and nothing to remember that life ever breathed anywhere.
And you know what? I still prefer that to believing a lie.
A well worded phrasing that resonates well with my perspective. His post was prefaced with one other sentence, saying, "My thoughts on death are incredibly bleak."
Here I disagree, in that I didn't find his view bleak at all. On the contrary, it captured well our existence as collections of molecules and electro-chemistry in the natural ebb and flow of matter and energy.
The universe is a beautiful manifestation of probability and pattern, complexity and depth. That within all that stuff, we can craft meaningful lives rather than just exist and procreate. That we can love and be loved, and create beauty from randomness gives us a reason to savour every moment between the before-we-were and the after-we-are-no-more.
