It's pretty widely known that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with immortality. They developed mummification, an elaborate series of procedures for preserving the human body after death. And with mummification, prayers, and suitable entombment they hoped to ensure that a person who had died--particularly, but not only their kings--would continue on in the afterlife with a happy existence.
The Vikings believed that a brave warrior would enter Valhalla and "live" there with much feasting and drinking of mead.
The seventeenth-century English writer Sir Thomas Browne saw fit to reflect on immortality when a Roman burial site was discovered in his county of England. He reflects that, for example, having your epitaph in half a dozen languages is no guarantee of immortality; only the Christian promise of resurrection, he concludes, is a sure way of achieving immortality.
It occurs to me that today we can have immortality. My musings--different from Browne's--began with my seeing a TV program with Jack Hanna, a famous zoo keeper and conservationist. The program might have been pretty old. Hanna, as seen on TV, doesn't get any older--so having a film or video of oneself keeps you at a certain age; you don't get any older.
And Alex Trebek died two months ago but episodes of the TV show Jeopardy!, which he hosted, are still being broadcast.
So, among all the incarnations of immortality that humans have dreamed of over the centuries and millennia, today we might actually have a means--a technological means--of preserving a person, in a manner of speaking, such that they won't age or we can see (and hear) them after they have died.
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