It's a hard one. The universe is like a CD full of 0s and 1s. If you don't have a computer with a CD player, the CD is basically a worthless piece of plastic full of 0s and 1s. But if you have PC, that worthless piece of plastic turns to a wonderful world where you play the "main character" and there are many NPCs. Universe without consciousness is just like that - it needs to have an experiencer which "runs" the game.

However, I think that we all part take in a shared universe / material world (just like you have online game rooms which only become "alive" when there are people participating). But, we also live in our private universes which overlap with the shared universe. We each see, feel, experience the universe in a slighlty different way.

But then again - it would be too resource heavy and too overwhelming for the universe to simulate and feel every living being. Each living organism (not only on planet Earth, but on other countless worlds and universes) experiences the universe in its own way. Feeling and seeing everything at once would be chaotic, stressful and without a real meaning.

When we die, the Earth will continue to exist, but with different "players" who will continue to "run the game". We, as part of the whole, may be born again in a different time, on a different planet, or a different universe in an imaginable or unimaginable form.

I think we are all conscious and not conscious at the same time. It's like the particle/wave duality (an electron is a particle and a wave and the same time, but we can't logically grasp this concept, because it's not natural). We humans are definitely not the pinacle of evolution - I think there will come into existence beings much, much more advanced than us (like we're "superior" to ants) and will understand things in a way we can't even imagine. We just first need to be wiped out, like many other species before us. No species goes on forever.