I don’t think anything else can be described as eternal life. An eternal existence without that which would make it worthwhile sounds like hell to me.
To some degree no. How much so is a matter of considerable controversy and debate.
You see I think the difference between the physical and the spiritual are these mathematical space-time laws which care nothing for what we want or believe. It means things can force themselves upon us and that is a friction against our beliefs and desires that makes changing our mind about some things a great deal more possible/likely. Death is like running out onto a frictionless surface where we keep going as our momentum dictates.
I think spiritual things exist by their own nature alone and our nature is a product of our own choices, so unless our choices have made connections with others a part of our own nature we are up a creek without a paddle.
We? Need? Some of this is incoherent because without the Earth we would not exist. Like I said before, I do not believe the results can be independent of the means. And thus your question logically becomes… why would God want anything more than the angels, which is the best He can do without the physical universe.
Angels may do a pretty good imitation of free will, like what we might expect from from AI eventually. But in the end they are after all only what God made them to be. We are different. We are participants in our own creation… all the way from scratch in the development of life from the non-living. We are definitely not just what God made us to be and I think that makes for more of a relationship than what you can expect with characters in novel or npcs in a computer game.