What drives people's belief in an afterlife? In this book, Michael Shermer, a popularizer of science and a well-known 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 historical and psychological material - from the dream of immortality, which has been characteristic of people since the dawn of civilization, to the purposeful solution of such problems of modern medicine and science as the reversibility of the aging process and increasing life expectancy. The author analyzes the ideas of the afterlife expressed in the Abrahamic world religions, cites 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 "paradise on earth". The common denominator of many of the most interesting historical and scientific facts that Shermer brings down on readers is an intense search for the meaning of existence in a meaningless, as the modern pessimistic consciousness tends to believe, the Universe.