With respect to physical and spiritual mortality and immortality, we humans differ from, for example, most if not all other mammals in our acute knowledge of our mortality. This great awareness of the life cycle does nothing to free us from it. We are conceived; we are born; we live for a time, during which we may reproduce and nurture offspring; and we die. I do not believe that, other than through genetic contribution to progeny, there is literal life after death for us or for other forms of life. (A species of jellyfish has, however, evolved to biological immortality.)
We human beings have unique power, through our big brains and technology, to affect planet earth and all forms of life that it supports, long after our individual lives cease. Unfortunately, it is easier for a human being to wreak long-lasting damage than to create long-lasting good.
Eventually, both the human species and our planet will cease to exist. Thus, immortality seems to me to be a meaningful concept only if defined oxymoronically as having temporal limits coterminous with the survival of planet earth or with the human species.
Our ideas may achieve immortality-- if not ascribable, then through their own DNA. Ideas interact with other ideas that give birth to other ideas, and so on. Hunting, toolmaking, know-how, language, oral tradition, music, farming, literature, religion, superstition, war, politics, science, teaching, law, technology, medicine, art, architecture, trade, business, finance, design, games, and all other human endeavors are based on, develop, and amplify ideas. Thus, in any human invention or innovation, there is potential immortality.
I do not believe that "things happen for a reason," or that a personal God has a plan for each of us, or indeed for the human species. I do not find any meaning in my cancer, other than as an ordeal that I hope spurred me to grow during my remaining life. Although I allow for the possibility of free will, I think that our individual fates are largely determined by randomness: It is good to be lucky, as I have been in so many ways in my life.
I am 67 years old. In another 67 years, there will be at most a few people who knew and remember me. In 500 years, like all but a handful of my 6.8 billion living brethren, I will be traceable, if at all, only in genetic material and/or genealogical records. Nevertheless, like any of my fellow humans, my fleeting mortality may leave in its wake contrails of immortality, however untraceable and dilute.
