Here's an upbeat death scenario.

Life doesn't evolve by accident. In fact "life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire life-like physical properties."

So we live in a universe that's fine-tuned in a hundred ways to produce beings like us. Yet strangely we don't see any other intelligent beings in the universe. Where are they? There's nothing special about our part of space, so intelligence and consciousness should have evolved many times. Yet no spaceships, large-scale construction projects, signals, etc. No apparent colonization efforts. Why does no intelligent species behave like we'd expect?

The Great Filter is the notion that something must be causing the end to all of these species, or that intelligence is just extremely rare in the universe. What "filter" does every intelligent species hit and why do they disappear?

We're about enter a new stage as a species, where instead of living purely physical lives, we will increasingly operate in virtual spaces. The notion of location will become far less important and slowly lose its meaning. In another 100 years our consciousnesses will be virtual. Our time in "bodies" will be akin to a brief larval stage. We will send self-replicating probes in all directions, ultimately creating a massive net around the milky way (even working at only half the speed of light, this should only take a couple of hundred thousand years.)

Suppose, though, that we encounter another net already in place, a field far more advanced that permeates space and is billions of years older and already teeming with trillions of alien intelligences. This field exists everywhere--even here, right now. Suppose that this is the real purpose of the universe--to create and populate this field. Like the foamy scum that bubbles up when you're making chicken broth, consciousness bubbles up and condenses from the ordinary matter of the universe.

Today, people with children will often obsess about getting as many photos and videos of their kids as possible. They're only young once, and we're terrified at the idea of unrecoverable information loss. What if this is a universal concern? What if whatever beings that populate this field of consciousness all around us also feel the compulsion to preserve as much information/consciousness as possible? When we finally have the technology to encounter and interact with this universal internet, what if we not only find trillions of aliens, but that our whole history as a species preserved for us, along with every human who has ever lived?