Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, why do all this theater when there is a much better long lived and respected tradition: Burial-at-Sea. Roughly 60% of the US pop lives within a 100 miles of a seacoast.

Wrap them in something organic for presentation, a weight stone, then, go out to sea (with family along option -others may be ok with remote video) and let them slip into the ocean like sailors buried at sea.

No creepiness, no vicarious cannibalism via eating veggies nourished by uncle Vinnie or aunt Mathilda or anything.

Traditional burial-at-sea.

View on HN

Parts of the body will decompose at different rates, so it won't be long before parts of the body will detach from the part that is weighted down. 7,000 people in the US die every day, 2.6 million a year. Random body parts from millions upon millions of corpses quickly find their way onto beaches everywhere, to the delight of sunbathers.

Was that reported around Leyte gulf and areas where thousands perished at sea? It may be a concern, but I’m not sure.

It's definitely a thing even without combat areas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discov...

So if you scale up from the relatively small numbers of people who die (and whose bodies aren't recovered) by accident or suicide near/in water, it's probably reasonable to expect a lot more of this. Maybe your idea is workable if you go far enough out that any detached remnants are grabbed by the big oceanic gyres.

Or if the people buried at sea aren’t wearing anything too buoyant, such as sneakers.

I don't know about the WWII case, but in countries like the UK where it is legal to be buried at sea there are regulations about where you can perform the ceremony specifically because bodies do drift: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-guernsey-24224570

Although the article mentions that this is the first time it's happened in 25 years, note that only about a dozen people every year choose to be buried in this way: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-38210497

As someone who lives in the middle of the United States, shipping my body out to the closest ocean for burial and flying family out to witness my burial doesn't seem very practical.

We have inland seas. The Great Lakes are vast and they can be barged out to sea (we’d need agreements with Canada; but feasible)

It may not be cost effective for some... but a large percentage (~60%) of the US pop live within a 100 miles from seashores...

My understanding is that the EPA does not allow you to dump human corpses in lakes. You also need to go >3 miles out to sea. https://www.epa.gov/ocean-dumping/burial-sea

Some entity was also probably not okay with composting bodies in your backyard —till this.

In California you can’t bury a corpse in your backyard either. But in most states you can.

I wonder how big of a trebuchet you’d need to launch a body 3 miles.

I don't even know if that's possible. 3 miles is a long way, and bodies are squishy and... easy to separate, relative to a rock or bullet.

The speed you would need to get that far might be high enough for the force to tear off limbs or to shred the skin. The chances of you getting a permit after you put "might rain human limbs or remains on the beach" is very low.

You'd probably have better luck with little solar-powered, GPS-guided dinghys or kayaks that can go out 3 miles, drop the body and come back.

Lake Superior is perpetually cold and near-sterile when you get deep enough. Not the greatest place if you want bodies to decompose.

How about burial in a volcano? All natural cremation.

That could be an option for Hawai’i!

What are the energy costs of transporting a body from inland out onto the ocean? Probably less than cremation I suppose. Still, with some slight modifications I think you could improve efficiency. Load the bodies into shipping containers, to take advantage of all that existing logistics infrastructure, then push the whole container over the side once the container ship is an appropriate distance from shore. You can even tell families that Vinnie and Mathilda have become an artificial reef.

Another pandemic, but this time with the Plague? No, please no shipping containers

Every year every person in US produces >10 tons of CO2, any energy required for their body disposal is irrelevant.

Well... Would be more like crepiness on steroids, "final dungeon boss level".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owKFlNU_T5w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7t1WguYJyE

I’m down with a “Viking funeral”. Yes, I know that the Vikings didn’t actually float their dead out to sea on perfectly good boats that were set on fire, but it’s still a cool idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com