In my post “The Egocentric Illusion,” which gives my take on David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement Address, I wrote:

Up until I was 39 or 40 years old, I genuinely believed in an afterlife, and like most people assumed my afterlife would be a pleasant one.  Then I decided I did not believe in God. I had always thought that an afterlife would require someone powerful to make it happen. So not believing in God meant I did not believe in an afterlife either. Realizing that most likely there was no afterlife was a big item of bad news for me. It made me less happy than I normally would have been for several years. That unhappiness caused me to think. Then and sometimes now, I tried to imagine the intelligent aliens who might be recording my consciousness digitally for later cybernetic resurrection, but I have lacked enough social support for that belief for it to be all that reassuring.

The link (embedded in the title of this post) to Marcelo’s Gleiser’s post, shows that social support for such a belief may not be totally lacking.