Although I don't like the thought of my body rotting somewhere, I do think it's probably just fair if my available biomass is turned after something useful after I'm dead, considering how much I will have consumed during my life. It's still only a symbolic gesture, but in that sense I'd prefer being liquefied and used as fertilizer to just being burned to relatively useless ash.
I wonder what the most ecologically useful way of disposing of a body is.
I still plan to donate my body to science.
A girlfriend in medical school said she wish she had a cadaver like my body for anatomy class. She said that she and nearly everyone in the class had to cut through inches of fat to get to the organs, also covered in fat. Such bodies may represent today's population better, but she said you could learn better without it.
The Zoroastrian way of disposal is rather exotic:
"The bodies are not placed on the ground because their presence would corrupt the earth. For the same reason, Zoroastrians do not cremate their dead, as it would corrupt the fire.
The dakhma is a wide tower with a platform open to the sky. Corpses are left on the platform to be picked clean by vultures, a process which only takes a few hours. This allows a body to be consumed before dangerous corruption sets in."
http://www.avesta.org/ritual/funeral.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/zoroastrian/ritesrit...
> The machine produces sterile brown effluent made up of minerals, salts, amino acids, soap and water ...
Don't tell Soylent about this.
I'd like to undergo taxidermy stretched over a robotic skeleton. With a bank of Li-ion batteries and a charging port on the belly button. And of course a few hard drives and a board or three and lots of sensors.
That way I can pre-program a bunch of activities for myself after death and finally catch up on all the stuff I meant to do but never got around to.
I wonder if this "alkaline hydrolysis" effectively destroys prions. With 1/9 people over 65 afflicted with Alzheimer's - and that's diagnosed - I am of the unconventional suspicion that prions are a culprit[1], though I am aware it is not a well-received suspicion. We've known for years that plants can uptake prions. We've verified that in cases of chronic-wasting-disease (etiology = prions) animal droppings from infected wildlife contain prions, which implies that humans may also pass prions through fecal matter and are perhaps more easily spread than popularly accepted. With the common application of Sludge (municipally treated and redistributed sewage) and the primarily bacterial means of processing it, it too seems a source of spreading prions. I wonder if more caution is due regarding the spreading of such a persistently virulent thing, and if the risk of prions isn't underestimated in many respects.
[1] James Ironside on prions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlIYGYA5q0s
It makes sense. Some comedian used to joke about the best land being taken up by golf courses and cemeteries. So, that has always stuck with me and I've long since planned on getting cremated.
I'd prefer a sky burial but that's difficult, or so I am told.
My goal is to become a fossil - literally - and take a message to the future with me. I'd need to be buried in soil likely to become sedimentary rock, something like a bog, or maybe a muddy river delta. For my message, I'd take something like a wooden abacus or astrolabe, something that will petrify like my mortal remains. I know, the chances are missions to one my fossil will ever be found, and we can only imagine by whom or what. But what a story that fossil will tell!
There's something decidedly less wholesome about having a jug of your great aunt on the mantle, as opposed to an urn.
> "Not everyone feels this way. Some critics recoil, in part because the effluent is released into local sewage systems."
Don't people know what happens to the body's blood during embalming? Goes down the drain.
I've already told my family that this is my preferred burial method.
I’d be down for this if my current plans are still too expensive to be an option when I die.
I’d like to be flung out of a mass driver towards interstellar space, naked, in the “starfish position.”
Starfish position for the uninformed is arms out, legs out. You know, the position you take when you drop onto your bed exhausted at the end of a long day.
Except my final bed would be emptiness, forever cartwheeling into the abyss...
Until I hit an asteroid or something.
I keep telling people I want a Viking funeral. And not one of those silly, historically accurate ship burials. I want to be pushed out to sea in a longship with a sword laid across my chest, with an expert longbowman to set me on fire with flaming arrows.
Is it anachronistic? Yes. Am I a badass Scandanavian warrior? Not even a little. Do I actually worship Thor? Only on census forms. But it makes me laugh about my death so I'll keep telling people that's what I want.
In my actual will, I'm an organ donor and donate anything left over to science, but no one needs to know that just yet.
Well, if its less expensive and more sustainable, then sounds great.
The only thing to get past is the way the idea reminds me of an episode of Breaking Bad.
Is that technique really "greener" than cremation ? Maybe you're not generating as much CO2 on-site but sodium hydroxide is made by electrolysing salt so it consumes a lot of energy.
I thought you were completely dissolved to the core making some kind of primordial soup, it was beautiful, until I read there are still bones at the end they can put in an urn. Could be better. The device is still worth it. Maybe the 500k model can do it? I like the fact you go into the sewage system or be used as fertilizer (if you are a pet). At the end, you can be drunk or eaten by other people.
Only beaten by: A/space burial to the sun or frozen in the middle of total vacuum B/cryo C/science.
Btw, it's the mobile version of the page. Here is the full one: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/business/flameless-cremat...
Cryonics + post enough incentive for someone to wake you up. The best incentive for someone to wake you up I came up with is putting lots of money in cryptocurrency and remembering the private key and writing "Will pay X BTC to anyone who wakes me up"
I started a beach Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Erie, PA 17 years ago called Don't Give Up The Disc. It's become many people's favorite weekend of the year and though I no longer run it I've made it back all but 1 year.
My plan is to be cremated and to have my ashes scattered on Beach 11 at Presque Isle State Park at the opening of the tournament following my death.
Bonus points if they can get some custom 175g frisbee made with my ashes mixed in the plastic, as they did with Ed Hedrick.
I wonder why do the alternatives to burial pick up, while cryonics doesn't after all these years?
How does it compare to the mushroom suit?
https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee
Does cost a lot though, $1500 http://coeio.com/
So, after liquefying the dead, are they recouping their water and returning it to the tribal reservoir?
Honestly I've been planning for a good old-fashioned Roman funeral pyre after I'm gone. Complete with some kind of monument with an inscription imploring passersby not to shit on my grave.
Along the lines of "alternatives to burials" — and probably of interest to the people here discussing leaving bodies in open air — the Criminal episode on the TSU body farm is absolutely fascinating. I haven't set up anything official yet, but I'm seriously leaning towards donating here.
http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-68-all-the-time-in-the-wor...
I don't know if it's an "option", but my preference is hovering around the idea that I just want my body (as is) to be buried in the ground.
Does this exist?
“It is every citizen’s final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people.”
—Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Ethics for Tomorrow”
There's at least one thing that really fascinate me about death.
That is that there's no way (as far as I can tell) for natural selection to "improve" how we die. My guess is death is the most diverse experience amongst all living things.
EDIT: Even without factoring in the idea that there are so many experiences that cause death.
Here is a composting attempt for dealing with the dead (grain of salt needed: TED talk ahead)
https://www.ted.com/talks/katrina_spade_when_i_die_recompose...
> When it’s a family that has just lost Mom or Dad, they’re in a more emotional state and they look at it and say it seems more gentle...
How does that make sense? They're dead. The way you treat their body has no effect on them.
Burial/funerary practices are really fascinating, as it's so intertwined with our ideas of morals and aesthetics (which have always themselves been part of the same thing). Ceremonial/ritualistic treatment of the dead is something that's been part of humanity for so long, and it's made us what we are.
For this reason, it's good to examine what sorts of funerary practices one finds aesthetically pleasing or off-putting, and to see if there are any trends. For example, I personally am less enamored of pure utilitarian/altruistic methods like donating one's body to science, or where you get your remains put into a package to grow a tree. Can't deny the usefulness and rationality of such things, of course. But the thought process of that I can't shake is "Well, at least I'll be of some use when I'm dead" or "I don't want to be a bother."
My thought is that there's something good in the notion, not just of the dead not being forgotten, but of having the dead impart some sort of cost or burden on the living. I actually love the idea of pyramids and ancient mausoleums, and the idea of people having been buried with personal or costly items -- not because I myself am interested in having a lavish tomb or "thinking I can take it with me," but because I think there's something primal in us that wants to find some way of making the sense of loss more concrete and material. (At the same time, that can be driven to excess in our modern funeral-director economic system, which itself tries to piggyback on that desire to throw wealth at the dead by instead throwing wealth at the living.) When it comes to burial, I've always liked large standing headstones far more than just flat markers, partially for historical/design purposes, but also just because I'm not a fan of making such gravestones less prominent just to make the job of a lawn-mower easier. I can't help but want graves to be obnoxious obstacles enough that someone has to deal with them individually.
When it comes to cremation or the article's "liquifaction," I find it curious that either method sits well with me except for the last step of cremulation. It's not something that we generally think about, but when you cremate a body, the fires aren't enough to get the job done -- you end up with many fragments of fragile bone rather than some uniform powder. At that point, the fragments go into a cremulator, which is essentially an industrial blender, to be pulverized into powder. Maybe I'm just a romantic for older methods, but the more modern industrial "grind grandma's bones in a blender" approach strikes me as much more violent than immolating a corpse. I'd much rather cremation was practiced as in Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_funeral#Cremation ) where the fragments themselves are hand-picked out of the ashes (or rather chopstick-picked) by relatives to be placed in the urn. I'd also be a fan of bringing back the practice of ossuaries to balance the desire for burial with the limitations of physical space.
Of course, this is all 'irrational' or 'illogical', but it's good to think about what we actually favor when it comes to funerary practices, and what it says about ourselves. I think that aesthetics, our sense of beauty/ugliness in this situation, is connected with our worldview, our personal history, and our morals/ethics in interesting ways. Looking through the thousands of years of human civilization and seeing how various people dealt with the trauma of death and loss is enlightening.
I mean, people have been dumping lye on bodies for a long time. That's all they're doing, but to a gooey extreme.
why not just toss the corpse into a volcano?
I just want to die without pain. My father death was beyond painful, even with the hospice drugs.
His last sentence to me was, "When will this end?"
I find it creepy, especially putting the resulting fluid somewhere it might leak into the water table.
Yuck!
Not giving a sh&&t about religion I want my ashes turned into an action figure but I need to make sure I design the figure before I drop dead so I don't get turned into a cheesy indiana jones action figure after death https://www.cremationsolutions.com/blog/introducing-crematio...
While we are on the topic I'd like to remind everyone that the absolute best thing that you can do for your family, friends, and loved ones in the event of your death is plan for it ahead of time. If you're sick or elderly consider prepaying for whatever services you'd like. The death industry is shady as fuck and it's easy to take advantage of the bereaved, who are in a fragile emotional state, just to make a quick buck. You have the ability to properly do your research, comparison shop, and plan rationally beforehand so use it.
When she reached 90 my great grandma prepaid for all her funeral services and had everything all set, including the dress she wanted to be buried in. Nobody had to worry about a thing. Of course, you risk some places going out of business, so this should be done only if your life expectancy is around, say, 5 years or so.