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Comment by shironineja | Hacker News Reader

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shironineja·

One of the proposed linked options is the Mushroom Death Suit from TED 2016. Sounds good to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc

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Human composting is also an option:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsopS7yTG8

Every year > 130M humans are born and >55M humans die. As mentioned in above article / video cremation isn't a very good option either as it ejects over 5,000 lbs of mercury into the atmosphere yearly.

Seattle trying to help make human composting happen:

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-machine-will-turn-corps...

> As mentioned in above article / video cremation isn't a very good option either as it ejects over 5,000 lbs of mercury into the atmosphere yearly.

That's pretty much irrelevant. Half of the mercury in the atmosphere is released naturally. The other half is mostly coal plants. Then there's some industrial processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)#Releases_in_...

That is deeply disturbing. I'd be fine with cremation or decomposing naturally but there is no way I would ever want a loved one to be buried that way.

Personally I would go for a sky burial but I doubt it would scale.

Edit: to be honest, just for myself, I don't think I would want it for any loved one.

The number of carrion feeders scales with the number of available corpses so...

That left me with a peaceful sense of my own mortality. I was not expecting that this afternoon, thank you for sharing.

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