"My prediction is based on only two assumptions. First, our visitors from space can die; they are not immortal. Second, they care about each other. When one of their own dies, they mourn them, just as humans do. These assumptions, I think, will have led these aliens to invent gods and a belief in the afterlife. Belief in the afterlife, where we defeat death and are reunited with loved ones who have died, is the basis of all past and current religions."
"Belief in the afterlife, where we defeat death and are reunited with loved ones who have died, is the basis of all past and current religions. This desire is so pervasive and universal that humans have imagined being reborn into an afterlife in many, many places, such as Heaven, the Fields of Elysium, Tartarus, the Isles of the Blessed, Valhalla, Fólvkvangr, Kibu, Pulotu, Duat, Diyu, Yomi, and more. It's a very long list"
Astrobiologists predict that extraterrestrial life will share biochemical similarities with Earth life due to widespread bioactive molecules and amino acids. If visiting aliens can die and care for one another, they will likely mourn their dead and seek ways to defeat death. The experience of grief and the desire to reunite with loved ones tend to produce beliefs in gods and an afterlife. Human cultures invented thousands of gods and imagined varied afterlives—Heaven, Valhalla, Elysium, Duat, Yomi—reflecting universal hopes to avoid death. Agricultural settlements and burial practices about 12,000 years ago intensified rituals around death and remembrance.
Read at Psychology Today
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