Hacker News Reader

Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com