An alternative to burial and cremation gains popularity | Hacker News Reader

An alternative to burial and cremation gains popularity

mobile.nytimes.com

122 pointseric-hu138 comments

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.

I suppose it might differ per country.

Here in The Netherlands you can insure yourself for a lot of things. Life insurance is one of the insurances to consider; it is generally good idea. If you start with it from your youth you pay less per year than if you start paying on from say your mid 30s.

Its also interesting how the elder go to retirement homes here, while in the USA it is normal to have your (grand)parents live with you if they're old age. Basically unheard of here in NL.

> Life insurance is one of the insurances to consider;

Cost is only one factor. The bigger thing is taking the need to make a bunch of decisions (and fight over a bunch of decisions) away.

> while in the USA it is normal to have your (grand)parents live with you if they're old age

This is really not that common here. Retirement homes and nursing homes are huge industries in the US.

Having elderly parents live with you in the US is probably more common among low income people, because nursing and retirement homes are both quite expensive.

Regardless of income, having elderly parents live with you definitely is the more humane thing to do. Say what you want, but nearly all nursing and retirement homes are horrible places to live -- even the 'top notch' ones.

My grandfather is getting older, has plenty of money, and we've visited a decent amount of retirement homes. It's seriously depressing to even consider he might have to live there.

Yes, certainly consider life insurance. You may not need it though. I would certainly include that with "plan for your death," which was my advice. If you assets and no dependants you don't need life insurance If nobody would be adversely affected financially if you die then you don't need life insurance.

The bigger issue is being free of making very important decisions during a time of grief.

A problem is the death industry can use your grief to upsell you and overcharge you, sometimes even breaking the law.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=125628&page=1

It's also not particularly normal to live with your parents when they are elderly in the US. It happens, but it's not really all that common.

This is a good idea and a great relief for the family. Make sure you leave all the documentation in a place where your loved ones can find it, though. We’re pretty sure that my grandfather had paid for his burial plot decades before he died but didn’t have the records. Meanwhile the cemetery had a record of a plot reserved but somehow no payment....

The documentation part is good.

I wrote a full description of what I have and where, with access details. I shared this with a friend I trust (he was cool and called me 6 months later to tell me that he cannot access my bank account anymore :) - I changed the password and forgot to update the document). Others were wondering if I was depressed or something, such preparation was weird in their eyes.

This is difficult to do in France.

I went to a funeral company, met a distinguished guy ready for his role of grieving with me over the loss of someone, and was completely taken off guard when I wanted to discuss the details of my funeral in 40 years or so. There was no way to prepare this with him and I doubt it is possible with any other company.

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.

Zoroastrian funerals[1] are pretty eco-friendly:

> Instead of burying the corpse, Zoroastrians traditionally laid it out on a purpose built tower (dokhma or 'Tower of Silence') to be exposed to the sun and eaten by birds of prey such as vultures.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/zoroastrian/ritesrit...

That sounds like a receptor for spereading disease maybe even something like Kuru

And I don’t actually think it’s very eco friendly. They only do that because the altitude doesn’t allow for enough microbial activity to break it down.

What altitude? This is a tradition that started in Persia and still exists in parts of India. I don’t think altitude has much to do with it. There are social issues when the Towers of Silence that used to be away from the population centers become surrounded by the growing cities, carrion eaters aren’t always the tiniest of creatures

I recall reading there is a problem with doing this in India because the birds of pray population has decreased by like 99% so there's often not enough birds to pick the body clean.

EDIT: there's another comment down thread saying the same.

Turns out to be logistically challenging in many ways (and fraught with the socio-cultural complications one would imagine in a tradition going back thousands of years):

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/26/death-city-la...

Also Tibetan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

There's an interesting concept I saw a few years back of the mushroom body suit: http://grist.org/living/mushroom-burial-suit-turns-dead-bodi.... It's essentially a bag laced with mushroom spores. You put it on an unembalmed body and bury it and the mushrooms use the corpse as fuel. Something like that and a backyard burial is probably the most ecologically friendly way of disposing of a body.

I'd very much like to be feedstock for magic mushrooms which my friends and family could use to commune with me.

My body is pretty beat up and should probably be treated as toxic, hazardous, or medical waste (or all three).

I don't want to be buried, burned, or donated. I'd prefer something like dipping into molten steel (or lava) like in Terminator 2, for everyone's safety.

If fungi can mitigate, neutralize all the bad stuff in my body, I'd be okay with that.

(The right kind of) fungi is incredibly good at neutralizing all sorts of bad stuff. There's a great deal of untapped potential in this space.

I recommend reading this article in it's entirety:

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/julyaug/13-mushrooms-clean-...

Sounds like being jettisoned into space orbit after death is right for you!

I was thinking Yucca Mountain.

There's an eco-friendly cremation process that was developed within the past two decades, where the body is flash-frozen using liquid nitrogen, and then pulverized into powder with vibration. Whatever happened to that? I'm finding articles on it from 1997, but it looks like it never gained much popularity.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-burial-machine-that-...

Ecologically useful is leaving it out to be broken down in a warm biologically active wild. Minimum energy spent, and it will provide energy throughout the local biome.

I suppose donating one's body to a forensic anthropology facility ("body farm") would be one way to go a out that.

http://forensicoutreach.com/library/5-places-to-leave-a-body...

In Sweden, it's increasingly common to contribute the heat from crematoria to the municipal heating grid: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/294963

You could look at "green burial", a small but growing option in the US. All natural materials for the casket, no embalming, a more or less natural site for burial. You can also be buried green-ly on your own land in certain more rural/wild jurisdictions.

http://www.us-funerals.com/funeral-articles/directory-of-gre...

> I wonder what the most ecologically useful way of disposing of a body is.

There seems to be a lot of TED talkers focusing on this question:

https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee

https://www.ted.com/talks/katrina_spade_when_i_die_recompose...

https://www.ted.com/talks/caitlin_doughty_a_burial_practice_...

I think I will ask my survivors to plant a tree over me. I'd be good fertilizer.

It used to be common for French vineyards to bury deceased donkeys in a pit of lime and grow a vine on the site. As you say, excellent fertiliser.

"normal" burial is pretty eco IMO. Your body goes back to mother earth, especially if the Jewish /Muslim tradition of just wrapping the dead person in a cloth is adapted.

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.

> A girlfriend in medical school said she wish she had a cadaver like my body

Such a compliment

Clearly she intends to dissect GP at her first opportunity. I say get out while you're still intact.

That only increases the odds of being dissected by removing any alternative uses she currently has for the body.

Better gain 100lbs if you think the relationship is going south.

plausible cause for divorce

Once they're done using your body, they still need to dispose of the remains. By "giving your body to science" you are avoiding having to make a decision at a personal level, but it doesn't answer the question of the best way to dispose of our deads at a societal level.

Of note: the Mayo Clinic uses the process mentioned in the article for the final disposition of donated bodies.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/body-donation/biocremation-resoma...

At societal level I think medical research should benefit first, and then we can discuss what to do with the actual [socially] useless waste.

Not denying that, just pointing out that it doesn't address the question of disposal, which is what is debated here.

Interesting that you mention that — holding neither strong opinions nor privileged knowledge about the matter, the desire to avoid making a comparatively uninformed decision about the disposition of my body after death "at a personal level" is precisely why I've been a total organ donor since the opportunity first presented itself.

The New York Times had a fascinating article trying to track down the people who ended up being buried in "Potter's Field". One story that stuck with me was of a wealthy, accomplished woman who donated her body to science. Once the New York University School of Medicine was done with her, her remains "now lies with 144 strangers in Trench 359."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-...

Oh no! A wealthy anonymous corpse, well that's just beyond the pale.

This is an incredible article, thanks for sharing.

"So you're saying I do look good in this shirt?"

A girlfriend in medical school said she wish she had a cadaver like my body for anatomy class.

Pre-med have all the best pickup lines.

A complete cadaver does require some organ of humility however.

I'm built like a stick insect and was told the same thing by an admiring biology student. It didn't inflate my ego as far as I know.

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...

https://www.thoughtco.com/zoroastrian-funerals-95949

Yes but the problem with sky burials are the environmental contamination of leaving hundreds of bodies (or whatever remains after the vultures have their supper) to slowly decompose in one single spot. You can easily google for images of typical Zoroastrian "Towers of Silence" and see that quite a lot of stuff is left over, which the villagers just sweep off the ledge into the center hole. The idea that the corpse is "picked clean" is really debatable and demonstrably false in many cases, as you can clearly see in the images of Towers of Silence. I don't pretend to be privy to the facts -- and perhaps someone will correct me with a citation -- but from my understanding, "environmental contamination" is often one of the arguments against allowing the construction of Towers of Silence.

This is the result of the use of Diclofenac, a non-steroid anti-inflammatory drug, to care for livestock. The vultures eat the livestock carcasses, and die of the diclofenac... in great numbers. 99.9% (yes) of Indian vultures are gone- which, among other things, makes Parsi sky burials ineffective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diclofenac#Ecological_effects

In the past, the vultures would have picked the bones clean. Now there's just not enough vultures- hence the image you describe.

Deer and other large mammals regularly die in the wild. Vultures are just the first stage of decomposition, so while they don't get everything even bones get taken care of and Towers of Science take up far less space than a cemetery.

The issue with human remains is really disease transmission, and while not perfect they do work fairly well.

Not unique to Zoroastrians; the "sky burial" tradition in Tibet and (parts of) Mongolia is much the same.

Beyond the symbolic aspects, it's practical in regions where there's very little wood for cremation, and the ground may be too hard for actual burial.

> The machine produces sterile brown effluent made up of minerals, salts, amino acids, soap and water ...

Don't tell Soylent about this.

Say, that gives me an idea... What if there was a way to turn the effluent into food?

Well it does have minerals, salts, and amino acids!

Joke aside, if it went into being fertilizer which then feeds plants which we eat... The plants are just playing the role of the processing mechanism for recycling those chemicals...

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

Protein staining in the study of Alzheimer’s disease is a common (and old) element of its analysis. This is part of how we identified tau protein plaque formation as part of the disease.

Prions are not part of the disease. They would stain, and be visible on microscopy. They are exactly the (type of) substance that has been stained for, and are more than large enough to show up on the various types of microscopy regularly performed on these tissue samples.

I’m trying to find a more explicit way of saying: these are easy to eee in exactly the ways that we examine these brains, so no, it’s not a prion disease.

Any insight on the possibility of transmissible amyloid pathology? http://www.nature.com/news/the-red-hot-debate-about-transmis...

It's super unlikely. Having worked in the field, I am almost certain that amyloids are a consequence of, not a cause of the disease. Otherwise, valeant's drug would not have failed so spectacularly a few weeks ago.

Prions (transmissible protein configurations in general) are not a part of the Alzheimer's disease. If it were, the valeant drug would not have failed so spectacularly two weeks ago.

The major risk factor in Alzheimer's is susceptibility to oxidative damage in the brain.

Is there any evidence that people who are at high risk for Alzheimer's will benefit from a regular regimen of antioxidants, then?

I Googled it and from what I saw as long as the temperature and pressure is high enough the prions would be destroyed.

Also, prions are a concern without fringe conspiracy theories.

If bases are good at one thing, it's destroying and denaturing proteins.

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.

Some comedian used to joke about the best land being taken up by golf courses and cemeteries.

That was the great George Carlin:

https://youtu.be/lncLOEqc9Rw?t=5m53s

That'd be him, thanks!

He is buried in a cemetery, according to Google. I wonder why? He seems to have been rather principled and I'd have not expected him to do so.

The other thing is that some really good thoughts come from comedians. Beneath the humor, there is frequently some good thoughts, intellectual thoughts. I wonder why this is? Psych is, obviously, not my domain. I don't really understand why we do many of the things we do, but I will avoid too much digression.

Maybe the Google reference was wrong; at least, Wikipedia says his ashes were scattered: "In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered in front of various nightclubs he played in New York City and over Spofford Lake, in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, where he attended summer camp as an adolescent."

Yeah, it looks like you're right - though he may have a tombstone, or the images of it might be faked.

That makes more sense, as Carlin seemed (if nothing else) principled.

I prefer the land in my neighborhood being used for cemeteries rather than for industry.

Human death is an industry and cemeteries are some of the players. Cemeteries would be obsolete if all humans had evolved the habit of cremation instead of isolated burial. Cremation costs zero units of space, isolated burial costs a finite amount of space in a world with scarce space.

If the market prefers isolated burial, then there's a market for space-consuming cemeteries. This probably costs a lot in government regulations, so cemeteries have to be big enough to absorb the initial costs.

Cemeteries are kind of a dumb idea and part of a backwards industry, driven by some silly need to bury people in quaint suburbs of death.

That sentiment is my bias showing, but it's kind of a no brainer: cemeteries are superfluous and are basically societal debt at this point. Let's hope we can count on people to move towards more economically friendly means of disposable:

1. Dump your dead friend in the woods. 2. Dump your dead friend in the ocean. 3. Dump your dead friend's ashes somewhere.

These are all better options than hogging some space, digging a hole, dumping your dead friend into the hole, then telling everyone that this land forever belongs to someone who can no longer use it.

I like cemeteries.

They're a neat mix of history, nature, and art. They're often isolated, beautiful, and quiet. Important people get monuments in public squares; all but the most poor throughout US history get a small plot and a little headstone. It's fun to think about people who otherwise have been completely forgotten: the eras they lived in, the family members they're buried with, the countries where they came from, their accomplishments in life, and sometimes the sacrifices they made for me. They're no dumber than any other monument you see to anyone anywhere else, except these are the monuments for the 99%, figuratively speaking.

Visiting a cemetery also reminds me that I'm mortal and one day my fate will be the same.

There's an extremely fair case to be made against cemeteries from environmental and/or space concerns, and you can accomplish a lot of the above goals in other ways. However, the dismissal of a very human desire to remember and/or be remembered deserved a response.

Yeah the aesthetic argument is one I can't really argue against. I also like cemeteries for aesthetic reasons, but there's no reason why we couldn't preserve a forest and then plant monuments there, followed by cremation.

Are physical monuments getting more or less popular? I mean, my whole history and life is basically on Facebook, which acts as a more thorough monument than any limited gravestone ever could. Remembering people through electronics seems like a complete eco-friendly replacement for altars and other space consuming habits.

Well, there are other choices. I don't think it's limited to cemeteries or factories. There are houses and parks, things of that nature.

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!

You might be interested in that self-mummification process that some Zen monks in Japan used to do.

Here's a plug for Barry Hughart's Master Li and Number Ten Ox books, where in a character collects mummified holy men who died while meditating, with the rumour that some didn't die of natural causes.

There's something decidedly less wholesome about having a jug of your great aunt on the mantle, as opposed to an urn.

You get an urn full of powdered bone. The liquid is flushed, or used as fertilizer.

Save your toe and finger nail clippings and other detritus and you can prepare the urn before you go and on death your entire collection of molecules can do something more immediately useful as in fertilizer. True reincarnation albeit in a different pattern.

Where does one buy soylent-green brand fertilizer?

societal norms are a bitch

There is nothing in particular to stop you from pouring the liquid into an urn if you want to. Maybe keep granny around in her favorite teapot or something.

> "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.

Your body won't survive the acceleration of a mass driver intact. Nor would it survive the rapid deceleration, if launched through an atmosphere.

This would obviously be done off the surface of the moon.

I would also accept being launched out of a trebuchet.

I won’t budge on the cartwheeling starfish. In case I pass by intelligent life in a few billion years I definelty want them to have a WTF moment.

I'm personally more fond of the "thinking man" pose myself.

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.

For the Viking funeral, would you also include the drugged slave girl in the rite?

How else would one have a Viking funeral?

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.

It says so. I assume someone's done this math?

>The environmental benefits of alkaline hydrolysis are significant. Its carbon footprint is about a tenth of that caused by burning bodies. Mr. Wilson said liquefaction uses a fraction of the energy of a standard cremator and releases no fumes.... the [effluent] is sterile and contains nutrients, so much so that it can be and is used as a fertilizer. Rick Vonderwell, who manages Tails Remembered, a pet crematory in Delphos, Ohio, uses the effluent at his farm, as do several large universities.

How is the 'effluent' not toxic?

("Effluent? That's Grandma!")

It’s basically drain cleaner (which becomes salty water as soon as it gets mixed with an acid), plus digested meat juice.

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...

Space/sun burial depletes the earth of water and minerals.

I'm not a pet, but would love to be used as fertilizer.

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"

Until they tap into your mind directly and threaten to turn off your life support unless you speak up

Or just put some gold in a safe so you don't have to worry about your crypto's value going straight to zero.

What are the chances a will like this could be successfully challenged in court by your descendants? I'm not a lawyer, but I wouldn't trust that purpose to stay protected. (No idea about blockchain contracts either, though, much less the price future of cryptocurrencies...)

Gold can also go to zero over time. Mining asteroids can do it very quickly.

Cryonics are a scam. Once the electrical impulses in your brain stop for an extended period of time there's no going back.

We don't know if Bitcoin will be the chosen cryptocurrency at that time.

Write up some smart contracts to keep your cryptocurrencies in the most vogue coin.

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.

"[Damon] Runyon died in New York City from throat cancer in late 1946, at age 66. His body was cremated, and his ashes were illegally scattered from a DC-3 airplane over Broadway in Manhattan by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker on December 18, 1946."

I heard it was a B-17, but Wikipedia says that.

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?

Was wondering if anyone else was having flashbacks to Fremen tribal practices in the Dune universe!

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.

> imploring passersby not to shit on my grave

This is oddly specific, it feels like a dare.

Yes it does seem like that, doesn't it? But Romans were particularly concerned about people shitting on their graves. If you start reading Roman epitaphs, they all universally seem to follow one particular format:

To the spirits of the departed, here is the grave of Publius Maximus, served in the Legions, who drank heartily every day of his life. Passersby, consider a moment this grave, but go on before too long, lest you shit here. This monument was put up by his dear brother Julius Maximus and measures ten feet at the front and twenty into the field.

They are literally all like that.

From this day forward I will try to decipher the Roman monuments I visit with extra attention for epitaphs.

If you're interested in the whole concept of Roman epitaphs, I can't recommend enough Death in Ancient Rome by Valerie Hope [0]. It is a fascinating perspective on the culture of the Roman Empire which demonstrates ideas that were important to them in a way that couldn't be known otherwise. I read loads of books on the Roman Empire, but I could not put this book down. I read it in a very short amount of time. If you only buy three books on the Roman Empire, this should be one of them! Also, you can click on this link confident that it's not a stupid referral.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Death-Ancient-Rome-Sourcebook-Sourceb...

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?

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_burial

“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.

If the way a creature died reduced the fitness of relatives, it could definitely be selected against.

That's true. I'm talking about that moment (or period of time) while your body is no longer your own and it's "transitioning" to death. That experience that a person has I am thinking could possibly be the most diverse of all experiences among living creatures. I wonder how could your DNA know how to alter that part of your life experience? And how could any of us really compare and contrast to know whether that is or isn't true, and / or select our partner according to how past relatives experienced death? There are "near death experiences", but how similar is their experience to the actual experience of dying?

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.

Emotions aren't supposed to make sense.

But how is chemical liquification more gentle?

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.

> 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.

Sure, as long as "the cost or burden on the living" is merely that of remembering our debt to the dead for their contributions to our present-day lives. (Cf. President Obama's "You didn't build that" remark during the 2012 campaign [0], which triggered outrage by opponents who quoted it out of context.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that

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?

Who is going to pay for the cost of transporting your body to the nearest active volcano?

All that matters is if it's cheaper.

Is it?

I find it creepy, especially putting the resulting fluid somewhere it might leak into the water table.

Yuck!

Cemeteries are also places where people's remains could eventually leak into the water table.

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...

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