What drives people's belief in an afterlife? In this book, Michael Shermer, a popularizer of science and a renowned critic of dogmatic thinking, addresses the eternal and mysterious themes of death and immortality. This is a bold attempt to cover in a concise form a huge amount of historical and psychological material - from the dream of immortality, characteristic of people since the dawn of civilization, to the targeted solution of such problems of modern medicine and science as the reversibility of aging processes and increasing life expectancy. The author analyzes ideas about the afterlife expressed in the Abrahamic world religions, presents the views of representatives of various fields of science - from particle physics to molecular biology - on the mysteries of aging and the possibility of victory over death, and also considers utopian theories of building a “heaven on earth”. The common denominator of many of the most interesting historical and scientific facts that Shermer brings down on readers is the intense search for the meaning of existence in the meaningless, as the modern pessimistic consciousness tends to believe, Universe.