The highly anticipated Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, is set to be released on January 9, 2018. Written by bestselling author and skeptic Michael Shermer, the book is described as a scientific exploration into humanity’s obsession with the afterlife and quest for immortality.
In his most ambitious work yet, Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality by radical life extentionists, extropians, transhumanists, cryonicists, and mind-uploaders, along with utopians who have attempted to create heaven on earth.
For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, the place where souls go after the death of the physical body. Religious leaders have toiled to make sense of this place that a surprising 74% of Americans believe exists, but from which no one has ever returned to report what it is really like.
Heavens on Earth concludes with an uplifting paean to purpose and progress and what we can do in the here-and-now, whether or not there is a hereafter.
Release date: January 9, 2018
Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye
The Moral Arc
The Believing Brain
The Mind of the Market
Why Darwin Matters
The Science of Good and Evil
How We Believe
Why People Believe Weird Things
Science Friction
The Borderlands of Science
In Darwin’s Shadow
Denying History
Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience
The Soul of Science
Image credit: Smith College, President Kathleen McCartney. When Jodi Shaw, a Smith College alum and…
Illustration: Adramelech, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire infernal — Source. Remember…
Corporeal prison, by Erik Pevernagie, oil on canvas, 2004 In 2011, then 16-year-old Demitrius Minor…
Filmmaker Chico Colvard, courtesy C-Line Films Filmmaker Chico Colvard accidentally shot his sister in the…
In my ongoing research on Antifascism and NeoFascism in the U.S., I have had contact…
Anyone following the Sarah Braasch "Napping While Black" incident at Yale University has probably heard…