[Gem]

Nice OP. It's very broad encompassing the universe's billions of years against out momentary lives, and if I might expand the temporal span into spacial dimensions, our infinitesimal size in the universe.This perspective diminishes self-importance. Like a one lost cell makes no difference to the body, our lives are an irrelevant flash in the pan against universal scales. We are led by this to at least hope there is more, that there are souls, a God, or a universal consciousness, and even a super-consciousness, compared to which, even the universe as a whole is disappearingly minuscule.

As self-aware beings, we must assume more to life than mere functions of physics. The idea that a body is born, consciousness emerges therefrom, then it dies and there's nothing, is exactly the same in principle as saying the universe is all there is. There are those that hold this to be true, but beyond the confines of reason, in the depths of their being, I dare say that the hope for infinity remains a insurmountable instinct.

The history of mankind and its production of knowledge is only a micro-second of natural history, but due to the power inherent to knowing, and how we cling to the known, we narrow the scope of possibility, and from that confined perspective, produce theoretical expansions of quantum fields, of universes, then multiverses, without realising this expression stems from a hope for infinity that is simultaneously being denied.

The human mind reaches for infinity in one way or another. Through self-awareness we know the limits of our own minds and the incompleteness of knowledge, and are therefore inevitably consumed by something compared to which the mind itself is vanishing.