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Reincarnation
I just can't get over the idea of:
Nothing --> Existing --> Nothing
So I figured, an unscientific philosophical guess, that existence is more like:
Noting --> Existing --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> [repeating forever]
Maybe "souls" is just an energy.
Einstein said energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So maybe, when we die, we become an energy that, by some ways we can't yet understand, just randomly becomes a part of another living being... maybe a human, maybe non-human, maybe this energy stays nearby here on Earth, maybe it somehow goes to a random alien planet and you become an alien the "next life"... who knows?
Or maybe this is just another coping mechanism my brain cane up with in face of the knowledge of certain death, influenced by the Eastern philosophy that I grew up with? Whatever...
Iirc some of the stoics believed in a similar idea. They thought the world was deterministic and it simply happened over and over the exact same way every time.
On the note of energy not being created or destroyed. The energy in your brain doesn’t wait till the universe ends to leave. It continues moving as heat or chemical reactions when we die just like it did before. The order of the system it’s in breaks down, but all that energy keeps existing forever.
Since you emit energy as infrared light just by being warm, and infrared is capable of leaving the atmosphere. It is possible, that just by stepping outside, some of your energy has already left the planet and made it to other astronomical bodies in our solar system.
If we assume there is life on any of the moons or planets or asteroids nearby, who knows, maybe some of the energy that used to be part of you has already become part of a new, alien, life form.
The Egg by Andy Weir
If it helps there is absolutely no reason to believe there is a privileged NOW and everything before is gone. It's like believing that walking over a path destroys the path behind you somehow. So ultimately after a fashion you are more eternal than stars. You are an edifice erected in eternity from inception to destruction. Einstein didn't believe in reincarnation but he did believe in a block universe.
Many scientists concluded the conservation of energy long before Einstein.
But
There are more and more people every year.
A alien planet got obliterated by their sun's expansion (or maybe they nuked themselves), so their energy/soul was just chillin around in space until there was enough biological vessels for them to get reincarnated.
At least that's my headcannon on this, totally unscientific, theory.
That’s pretty much what science says