Hope is a many-faceted thing. I'm no angel, but I like to think that I'm sufficiently ethical that somebody will be willing to scan my brain into digital form, and let me have enough backups spread widely enough that some version of me will keep on kicking into the far-distant future. 'Immortality' is a weird word, and gets complicated when dealing with whether or not 'infinite time' is a thing that can exist; but I'm willing to try for the former, and hope for the latter, and not worry overmuch about our universe ending until physics appears to have been settled for, oh, a thousand years or so.

I'm currently rooting for a particular theory which does away with the need for dark matter and dark energy, in which relativistic effects and inertial mass are the result of applying the uncertainty principle to a universe with finite horizons, and the whole thing is derivable from treating quantum physics as a subset of information theory. It could very well be wrong, but if so, it's wrong in a way that opens possibilities for approaches not usually mentioned in popular science programs.

(I'm also keeping a close eye on another set of theories, in which electrons are treated as photons circling around and around in a very tiny orbit, held together by the same strong nuclear force that holds protons and neutrons together; and have even hypothesized that this theory's forces can be explained by the horizons of the previously-mentioned theory. I'm a lot less confident in this theory, though, even if the people arguing about its details are somewhat more grounded than those who argue about angels dancing on pins.)

Art by Tailsteak ( https://www.furaffinity.net/user/tailsteak/ )