Why Mushroom Suits Won't Work and How to Apply Cemetery Studies | Hacker News Reader

Why Mushroom Suits Won't Work and How to Apply Cemetery Studies

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The fact that his TEDx Talk had 0.2% of the views of her TED Talk and he actually knows what he is talking about tells you everything you need to know about TED Talks.

Let me add some substance to my comment. I grew fungi for a living and my boss bought an anaerobic chamber to try and find fungi that like no oxygen or low oxygen (microaerophilic) environments. Think glove box with thick plexiglass walls and all that. Even using lake sediments etc., we really couldn’t find any that grew or liked it at all, or at least before the plates dried out over several weeks. Fungi are aerobic organisms for the most part. They love oxygen. And switching from aerobic respiration to anaerobic drastically reduces how fast something can grow. An old rule of thumb quoted is aerobic processes produce up to 38 ATP per glucose, anaerobic processes yield only 2 ATP per glucose. I assume in a coffin or buried underground, oxygen is gone very quickly from the bacterial bloom. So I don’t understand how her mushroom suit idea was ever going to work. You weren’t going to sprout a big flush of oyster mushrooms out of your body, it was just a fantasy like most TED talks. It’s science junk food.

Yes. The original promise of of TED of presenting science and progress through well delivered talks got completely sidelined by telling make believe.

apparently anaerobic fungi were discovered in the 01970s after decades of misidentification as protozoa https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7609409/ which of course means that they don't include any mushroom you've ever seen

We did a full body burial at see for a friend a couple years ago.

The body is not embalmed. They are wrapped in a biodegradable burial shroud. Then, you take them on a boat and head toward open ocean (for about 2 hours). Then strap 600lbs of rocks to the body and toss it over board. They said the body is just a skeleton within about 6 months.

The whole thing cost $10k. This included body transport, preparation, boat/crew, and a catered meal during the ride back to shore. It was a really beautiful way to say goodbye to a friend, and a very eco friendly option that I don't think most people are aware of.

The clear message is that if you run the body through a large grinder before burial, it will degrade far faster.

This is already available for livestock, and if you'd like to see it in disturbing action, you can search YouTube for "Whole animal carcass shredder | shredder for bio Methanation"

It's useful for methane production, as well as extracting lipids for industrial purposes.

Efficiency in disposal of human remains is a disturbing topic and I'm not sure thats what we should be optimizing for!

> Efficiency in disposal of human remains is a disturbing topic and I'm not sure thats what we should be optimizing for!

It may be important for space colonization one day!

Isn't space colonization one of the potential ways to get rid of undesirable persons for whom you would otherwise need that efficient human remain disposal for?

Do you mean people like telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants?

Certainly not an efficient way

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-water-cremat... (Smithsonian Magazine: Could Water Cremation Become the New American Way of Death?)

> During alkaline hydrolysis, a human body is sealed in a long, stainless-steel chamber, while a heated solution of 95 percent water and 5 percent sodium hydroxide passes over and around it. In low-temperature alkaline hydrolysis, the solution reaches a temperature just below boiling, the process is performed at atmospheric pressure, and the body is reduced over the course of 14 to 16 hours; in a higher-temperature version of the process where the mixture tops 300 degrees Fahrenheit and creates more pressure, the body is reduced in four to six hours. The process dissolves the bonds in the body’s tissues and eventually yields a sterile, liquid combination of amino acids, peptides, salts, sugars and soaps, which is disposed of down the drain at the alkaline hydrolysis facility. The body’s bones are then ground to a fine powder and returned to the deceased person’s survivors, just as the bones that remain after flame cremation are returned to families as ash.

It also retains more mass in the ash than cremation, so less of your loved one goes up the smoke stack (or down the drain).

I recall when I received my father’s remains it felt like almost an inconveniently large amount of ashes. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think mass efficiently is really a primary concern. I’d have been just fine with a little vial.

I recall being self conscious after attempting to spread the ashes at the beach on a mildly windy day and inadvertently creating a large dark cloud of human dust. And then wondering what to do with the pile of ash in the sand? I guess I’ll kick this about a bit to spread it around? It was all weird and a little funny, but things you don’t really think about until you do it.

Yeah the classic scene from the Big Lebowski comes to mind, with the Dude getting a face-full of ash downwind.

I wonder what the juice smells like afterwards?

Also it’d be cool to have the option to keep the bones without grinding.

Isn't it interesting how we immediately get uncomfortable with that thought? I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Logically, there’s no reason to get upset about bodies being ground up after they’re dead (since, well, they’re dead). But something about the (cultural?) sanctity of death and burial turns a whole lot of gears in my brain that I can’t explain.

That's purely cultural - sky burial is a thing in some parts of the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial For those that don't know the term

Personally, I feel like I'm not any more uncomfortable with it anymore than I am with cremation – both would be pretty gnarly if they happened to you if you were alive!

If we're using applied while alive as a guide, burial might be the worst on account of duration...

I can't explain it either, but I'm the total opposite of you. My body will be trash, do whatever with it. Compost me, who cares. My spirit will live in the memories of others, which is why the things I do and say now are important. Hofstadter explains this concept of self, spirit, and memory in I am a Strange Loop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

Funerals are for the living. just put me in the trash

Not sure if Frank Reynolds or Diogenes of Sinope.

Actually, maybe I know the answer based on that awesome word in your username.

Same person.

I've told my family they can leave my corpse in the forest for the wolves to eat, or roll it in a carpet and throw down a bridge, don't care one way or the other.

So yeah, cultural sanctity of death is indeed interesting.

Wolves don't eat carrion as far as I'm aware, so you would be not helping the wolves if that's your goal. Perhaps taking long night-time walks in the forest would be go down better? As for the bridge idea, I think the officers in charge of silt removal would not appreciate your legacy either.

I think cemeteries perform a rather useful function which is closer to waste disposal than ritual - the ritual is to soften the blow of that impersonal, utilitarian attitude to death.

> Wolves don't eat carrion as far as I'm aware [...] As for the bridge idea, I think the officers in charge of silt removal would not appreciate your legacy either.

The beauty of the plan is that I would not have to worry about any of these.

Death rites are not for the benefit of the deceased.

I keep telling my kids that they should wrap me in linen and dump me into a silty lake so that I have the best chance to fossilize, but they go on and on about "respect for the dead" and "police" and whatnot so I'll probably just end up in a box.

My standing orders are to donate whatever organs/pieces that are still viable after I've finished trying to destroy them with my lifestyle. Take the rest and wrap it in linen and bury it without a box in the backyard. We have registered with the county as having grave sites, so it's perfectly legal.

I tell them that I want simple with my remains, don't go nuts. That way you can spend all that extra money on a 30 foot marble statue of a sword wielding archangel Michael that shoots fire and shouts my name occasionally.

Have you tried requesting burial in New Orleans? Although you might float out before you fossilize.

Being fossilized and found by future archaeologists a few thousand years down the line sounds like one of the better ways to end up. Too bad I will never know about it.

I have family members who've said the same thing. They'd insisted that they didn't care at all about what happened to their bodies when they died, but when I suggested they donate their bodies to necrophiliacs they didn't care for the idea.

Go for a Tibetan-style "sky burial": just add vultures!

The thing is, it doesn't matter to the dead, but has psychological and physiological implications on the living :)

Even cremation, common though it is, weirds me out. I won't make any claims to it being a rational thought process, either. Dead is dead. But there's something about eliminating the form of the body that just makes me feel unwell. I didn't even know I would feel that way until years ago when my little brother passed away and was then cremated. The moment I found out he had been cremated was more emotional than I'd have thought. It wasn't quite as bad when my mom recently died and was also cremated, I knew what to expect, but still. I occasionally go to my father's grave (not cremated) and feel as if I can talk to him. No such delusion is possible when I go to my mom's grave site.

I'm weird. No denying that.

Growing up we always buried pets when they passed and the ritual was somewhat soothing. Digging the hole yourself was part of the final rite.

When my partners cat got euthanized she let the vet just walk away with the body for cremation and we got a little box of (hopefully the cats) ashes a few weeks later. Felt gross to me but she didn't want to touch the body and was fine having that sterile veterinary room be the last time she saw her.

Ten days ago my mate's dog died. I was so very fond of that absurd little creature. I've lost very few people that I care about so I don't have much to compare with, but the little creature's death hit me really so hard, more so than with any person. I have heard that the death of a pet can hit harder than that of a person, and that's what I seem to have found much to my astonishment. Has anyone found the same?

I've lost many pets over the years and my father, and grandparents I was close to. I think it depends on the circumstance. Losing a pet unexpectedly is worse than losing a grandparent to old age. A pet dying of old age is a mix of grief and relief (especially if you have to make the decision). My father died suddenly of a heart attack, that was worse than losing any of my pets, but it was a more amorphous pain, spread out over time.

We're with our pets a lot more than with extended family so it makes sense that a pet dying can be more intense than losing a friend or family member who does not live with you.

I don’t share your perspective, but I appreciate it. Grief has no logical framework, so sometimes the result of it is a bit “illogical”.

Thanks for sharing.

We just need a nice term, like Cremation. If we said “we just need to toss the body in a furnace and light it on fire”, we’d get equally squeamish.

Perhaps we should say “as long as we brecciate the body, it will biodegrade quickly”

Fascinating!

Apparently human-composting is legal in the state of Washington (see: Recompose). Curious what the author thinks about this for "Green Graves." It seems like we're past the experimentation phase.

Now there’s a business idea -figure out something to do with the 2-3 Billion pounds of waste chicken feathers produced annually.

Feather meal, animal feed, disposable diapers, and fuel for incinerators to heat/power plants are the existing uses that I know about from just Tyson Foods.

Food production is super highly optimized; I have to imagine this exists already in most plants.

This is consistent with my understanding that everything that can be sold out of an animal processing plant already is.

Yeah exactly, nothing from an animal is wasted, they're too expensive for that.

It used to be said that they use every part of a pig except the oink.

My in laws run a company that use hydrolysis to extract amino acids from waste feathers. Sells them to the pet food industry

one idea could be to produce less chickens

But how do we stuff our faces with excessive amounts of meat then?

Oh, that's been done; biofuel. It has actually become a bit of a _problem_ in some places AIUI; in countries where coal has been largely or entirely eliminated, it can end up being responsible for a surprisingly large fraction of atmospheric mercury emissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_composting

Does writing this in columns give it more authority?

(I found the content interesting, but I'm not sure why the author wants me to scroll down and then back up.)

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