No one probably knows but I might as well ask.
By the simple fact we have a dead narrator that has been a ghost for a million years there is a sort of afterlife, the “blue tunnel.”
Do the humans of a million years from now go into that afterlife? And if not at what point in or de-evolution did they stop having a soul?
How is that an answerable question? If you believe that humans alone can have souls and participate in an afterlife, then you probably don’t believe in evolution of lower species into humans, or vice versa.
It’s been years since I read that book, but IIRC it was implied that Kilgore Trout’s son was the only one who was invited into it. He didn’t consider the descendants of the (hairy tribal girls and the captain) to be exactly human and couldn’t communicate with them.
Could be like Twain’s Captain Stormfield: there are millions of heavens and you have to find the one for your particular species.
I think he was invited in but refused to go. His ‘punishment’, as it were, was to stay on Earth for a million years.
I don’t recall any mention of when or if there was a clean cutoff between AD 2000 afterlife and AD 1,002,000 afterlife.
BTW, while I realize the humans technically didn’t ‘de-evolve’ (evolution only moving forward and all that), did they lose the ability to communicate intelligibly with each other?
What difference does it make if they do or don’t go to heaven? The book never gave a reason saying they didn’t, so I’m going to assume they do.
And nothing de-evolves. Organisms adapt to their enironment to maximize their chance of survival. The humans had a better chance of surviving as seal like-animals so that’s what they evolved into. It’s no less de-evolution than if we were evolve into insects to survive or giant brained goliaths. Whatever works, right?
Yep. I just read this book over Thanksgiving. I don’t recall specifically if the narrator ever said, but I assumed that humans, no matter when, still went into that blue tunnel when they died. They just did it with flippers and stuff.