Liberation and Immanence
In the Indian religions of liberation, the highest good is not a perfected society or a more stable version of worldly happiness. It is release. The Hindu vocabulary makes the structure plain: moksha means release from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. The point is not to improve one turn of the wheel but to cease turning with it. The Muktika Upanishad runs through the familiar devotional forms of liberation and then says that there is only one true emancipation, videhamukti, disembodied liberation. Buddhism shares this horizon even though its metaphysics differ. Nirvana is the extinguishing of the fires of lust, anger, and delusion, and with that the end of rebirth. Buddhism is careful to say that nirvana is not simple annihilation or a craving for nonexistence. Still, the highest good is defined as the overcoming of ordinary embodied recurrence. Jainism arrives at the same destination by a different route, treating liberation as the purification of the soul from the karmic matter that binds it to bodily existence through many births. The traditions disagree about what the self is, whether it exists, and what binds it. They agree that physical life as we know it is not what is finally affirmed.
Follow this logic to its conclusion and you reach a strange place. If the ultimate purpose of the teaching is that all sentient beings achieve liberation from the cycle of rebirth, then the completed mission is an earth with no one left on it. The Buddha's OKR is a planet that looks like all the other ones — empty of minds and their suffering, indistinguishable from Mars. Universal compassion, fully realized, produces a world with no one in it to be compassionate toward.
Christianity and Islam replace the wheel with a line, but the line still ends somewhere other than here. Both prophesy a final judgment, after which life on earth as we know it does not continue. The dead are resurrected, the worthy enter paradise, and history is over. Life here, however long and however meaningful, is preparation for that verdict.
The convergence on asceticism across traditions that otherwise agree about almost nothing is the behavioral proof. If ordinary life were the point, you would not see celibacy, fasting, and withdrawal treated as rational tools across every one of them.
The modern scientific imagination starts from a different place. It does not ask how to leave the human condition behind or how to wait for its divine completion. It asks how to deepen human life here. Its rough popular image is the post-scarcity world of Star Trek. Its more serious image is a civilization that has reduced a large share of avoidable suffering, widened freedom, extended knowledge, and made the pursuit of truth, beauty, and self-command available to many more people than before. It affirms physical life as the site where value should deepen. It counts, not on perfect humans, but on better humans in better institutions.
The liberation traditions and the Abrahamic traditions, for all their differences, want to leave earth. The scientific imagination wants to leave it better. We inherit unfinished work and pass forward better tools, better institutions, and a stronger disposition toward truth-seeking.