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Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
Imagine that Lucy and Luke are middle-class twins, who agree to take part in a subjective well-being study. On the way back from the psychology laboratory, Lucy’s car is hit by a bus, leaving Lucy with a number of broken bones and a permanently lame leg. Just as the rescue crew is cutting her out of the wreckage, the phone rings and Luke shouts that he has won the lottery’s $10,000,000 jackpot. Two years later she’ll be limping and he’ll be a lot richer, but when the psychologist comes around for a follow-up study, they are both likely to give the same answers they did on the morning of that fateful day.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
It was inaccurate to say that the receipt of the extra-Trisolaran message had no influence on his life. After confirmation, Trisolaris would surely reduce the number of listening posts. And posts like this one, behind the times, would be among the first to be cut. Then he would be unemployed. A listener’s skills were very specialized, consisting only of some routine operations and maintenance. It would be very difficult to find another job. If he couldn’t find another job within five thousand Trisolaran hours, he would be forcibly dehydrated and then burnt. The only way to escape this fate was to mate with a member of the opposite sex. When that happened, the organic material making up their bodies would meld into one. Two-thirds of the material would then become fuel to power the biochemical reaction that would completely renew the cells in the remaining one-third and create a new body. Then this body would divide into three to five tiny new lives: their children. They would inherit some of the memories of their parents, continue their lives, and begin the cycle of life anew. But given the listener’s low social position, lonely and enclosed workspace, and advanced age, what member of the opposite sex would be interested in him? In the last few years, the listener had asked himself millions of times: Is this all there is to my life? And millions of times he had answered himself: Yes, this is all there is. All that you have in this life is the endless loneliness in the tiny space of this listening post. He couldn’t lose that paradise, even if it was only in a dream.
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
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