>>13632346I, too, wonder. Even /sci ponders. Life may be abundant in the universe, but intelligent life is probably a cosmic rarity. Earth contains a perfect environment for life to grow, and mankind was coincidentally able to exploit it fully. Our natural, animal-instinct cognition quickly became metacognition, the cognition of cognition. This is what we call "consciousness" or the "soul".
The universe is likely infinite. Zero does not fundamentally exist in reality, and the function zero may as well be infinity. Try to divide a number by zero and you can't, because you get a paradoxically infinite set. There is no "true empty" in the universe; it is constantly filled with things, even in the void of space there are quantum field fluctuations.
This is proof that death can't be "nothing". Once, life and subsequently death was described to me like this: you take one droplet of water from the ocean, and that is you. Your being. When you die, you return to the sea, remerging with everything, back where you came from. This is just like our mind and the universe, separated and given the illusion of the perception of time, waiting to fade back into infinity and maybe do it again. Since you have already been "alive" once, that means there is a non-zero probability of it happening, and therefore in a truly infinite universe you will be infiitely alive.
Our intelligence is a consequence of the complexity of evolution, and evolution in itself has no end-goal or purpose. It makes mistakes often. I have never taken any drug, but after reading about DMT trips I understand what they are. They don't take you somewhere else; they close off your conscious senses from baseline reality, and merge your subconscious mind with your conscious one. Perhaps whatever lies at the center of that will give one the answer to their existence, or maybe it's just a crazy hallucination. Maybe reality is just a crazy hallucination.
