All the happiness that the warm thought of an afterlife ever produced in humanity, has now been more than cancelled by the failure of humanity to institute systematic cryonic preservations after liquid nitrogen became cheap to manufacture. And I don't think that anyone ever had that sort of failure in mind as a possible blowup, when they said, "But we need religious beliefs to cushion the fear of death." That's what black swan bets are all about—the unexpected blowup.

Y'know, I can't help but notice that a lot of atheists talk about how death isn't so bad - oh, he lives on in his works, it's part of the circle of life blah blah blah - and this seems to suggest that deathism isn't a side-effect of religion, although obviously it's possible to construct models where they're unprepared for harsh reality after a lifetime of heaven or whatever. So I would be surprised if a counterfactual world where religion never caught on had implemented universal cryopreservation. Does anyone have any stronger evidence, or a model that better predicts the facts?