The Pharaohs spared no expense in their preparation for the afterlife. In addition to a projection of power for their immediate successors and hopefully their dynasty, lavish funeral preparations were directed towards ensuring that the body and grave goods would remain intact against the assault of time and invaders. Their preserved body would ensure their eternal enjoyment of the afterlife, destruction of their body would put an end to this.
For the pyramid builders of the Old Kingdom, this may have been a plausible goal: Egypt changes little in the longterm, dominated as it is by the cycle of the Nile, and the tombs were the first and only structure of their size. But after the chaos of dynastic changes and the intermediate periods, the Pharaohs of the Middle and New Kingdoms knew that it was not so easy. Tombs were raided, rivals desecrated each other’s remains. They moved to secret burials in the Valley of the Kings, but if the universe continued to have bad times as well as good, surely these tombs would be discovered too. The Valley, like Egypt itself, is ultimately finite, and given infinite cycles of good and bad, these tombs too would be destroyed. Living forever only makes sense if you don’t think about it too much.
We moderns have far more history to draw from than the New Kingdom Pharaohs. We know that they were naive not to realize that their religion would be conquered, technology would progress, and all of their tombs would be pried open, and their corpses kidnapped and dismembered in the name of science and history. We know that the concept of time, cyclical or linear, has changed many times and differs between civilizations. Jesus will raise the dead in some thousands of years, the Buddha Maitreya will return in the time when the human lifespan of humanity is 80,000 years and will commence a new 16 million year kalpa within an infinite cycle, and we now believe that the universe itself is finite and will end in about 10 to the 106th power years.
But we still talk about forever. To console ourselves for a finite lifespan, we hear many platitudes about the infinite. “He may be dead, but he lives forever in our memory.” “She lives forever through her work.” “He will always be remembered for his contributions to Egyptology.” And we take these seriously too. We inscribe these on our own public tombs, in the hopes that they will be taken seriously. We put plaques on park benches, dedicate foundations and buildings in the names of loved ones. We really do hope to be remembered forever, but not in a serious way.
Even discounting the heat death of the universe, we can assume that as the number of people increase, and as history continues, there will simply be too many people to remember or honor or think about. George Washington forever lives in the minds of his countrymen, but what about when there is no America, when America is one among so many others. We know the names of the Pharaohs, but who now remembers them? We know no names from 10,000 years ago, and the most rational assumption is that everyone on earth except perhaps a handful will be forgotten in 10,000 years. We can imagine different ways that everyone might be remembered: an infinite population increase, institutes devoted to automatic remembering. But hoping for such scenarios is like hoping for a tomb that will never be discovered.
If we are lucky we will be remembered in 100 years, maybe even 500. Only the luckiest can hope for thousands, and much more beyond that is likely impossible to predict. When we speak about living forever in memory or in deeds, this is what we mean. 500 years, maybe a few thousand. Ancient Egypt lasted for 3000 years, their forever was the same as ours.
The Mormons believe that performing proper rites for ancestors can allow them passage into heaven, which has led to excellent genealogical discoveries. If Mormonism survives long enough, we may end-up with a list of all with living descendants.
What if we took forever seriously?