What happens when we die?

peasant wrote: »

I only want an afterlife if my dog(s) will be there also.

valoren wrote: »

There are two aspects for me. What happens to your consciousness and what happens to your body which houses and enables that consciousness to function. Clinical death is simply a failure of your body to facilitate the delicate balance required to sustain consciousness. You literally black out. Permanently. Your own personal consciousness ends as the mechanism i.e. your brain/body/senses can no longer perceive the physical world. The crude analogy is an electric circuit. Remove the battery and the current stops but the physical constituents of the mechanism remains. It just doesn't work or do any work anymore. The other aspect is what happens to your body. The hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen atoms and the molecules they coalesce into are still present after you die. If you get cremated then you will mostly be carbon. If you're buried then you chemically decompose in the earth itself.

This leads onto what happens to the earth itself and all of the atoms which make us and everything else up. Earth will ultimately get consumed when our star burns through it's fuel. Whatever forms of "life" on earth, be they physical or mechanical, will inevitably perish during that process. There is the hypotheses of the Big Crunch/Bounce which is one I would subscribe to. Ultimately all matter in the galaxies of the universe end up in the singularity of the supermassive black holes at their galactic centre via gravity. Over the course of trillions of years these billions of supermassive black holes will, again via gravity, slowly converge on themselves and collide. The Milky Way's black hole, and all of us, will participate. Ultimately we all end up with a hyper massive black hole containing all the matter of our universe. This black hole itself evaporates over the course of another trillion years or so until we're left with a primordial singularity with infinite density. As energy is a conserved quantity then all of the energy of the universe we knew is contained in that single point. This might lie dormant again for a few trillion years until a quantum fluctuation releases that energy into another universe. Whether this new universe has the proper conditions to allow it's particles to form into matter and ultimately into life will be down to probability. We're just part of that process, one which to us happened to work, and so we should be thankful, given the mind boggling scale of this process, to participate in it for even a short time.