6 Feet Under Or Ashes To Ashes?

[jeremyb]

Was unsure on what section to post such a topic, so it fell here.

 

I asked my sister today "When you die, do you want to be buried or cremated?" Her reply was "Cremated, I am scared of the dark and closterfobic" (spelling?)

 

a few questions for you:

• 
   
  
• When you die, do you want to be burned to ashes (cremation), or buried in the ground?
  
• Do you think people should be given the choice (this day in age)? If not, should everyone be burned or buried?
  
• If everyone that ever lived was buried, how much land would that take up? (guesses i guess)
   
  

 

or as an alternative, voice your opinions on the subject if you have any at all.

 

Burned or Buried.....or is there another choice?

 

I feel that we need to stop burying people just for the sake of space, as the human population grows, and all the cemeteries get full, this will become a problem, if its not one already.

I have seen stories of come places digging up old graves to make room for new ones.

[Lancewen]

Was unsure on what section to post such a topic, so it fell here.

 

I asked my sister today "When you die, do you want to be buried or cremated?" Her reply was "Cremated, I am scared of the dark and closterfobic" (spelling?)

 

a few questions for you:

• When you die, do you want to be burned to ashes (cremation), or buried in the ground?
• Do you think people should be given the choice (this day in age)? If not, should everyone be burned or buried?
• If everyone that ever lived was buried, how much land would that take up? (guesses i guess)

 

or as an alternative, voice your opinions on the subject if you have any at all.

 

Burned or Buried.....or is there another choice?

 

I feel that we need to stop burying people just for the sake of space, as the human population grows, and all the cemeteries get full, this will become a problem, if its not one already.

I have seen stories of come places digging up old graves to make room for new ones.

 

Regardless of which choice one makes there could be problems caused. My personal preference is cremation, but suppose a so called loved one murdered me (I'm thinking poison here), cremation sure helps get rid of the evidence. Yeah! I watch to many CSI programs, but I really would hate to think my murderer would get away with it because I was cremated. Actually if I could afford it I'd like to have my remains converted into a diamond. Not sure what it cost but they can do it.

[CraigD]

Burned or Buried.....or is there another choice?

Solyent Green? :)

 

I feel that we need to stop burying people just for the sake of space, as the human population grows, and all the cemeteries get full, this will become a problem, if its not one already.

I have seen stories of come places digging up old graves to make room for new ones.

Pretty much every densely populated area for the last few thousand years has had to "recycle" old graves, crypts, or what have you, by removing the old remains to make way for new. Early Christians, who believed that the dead would be physically restored - flesh grown back onto bones to walk the Earth again in a kind of heaven - were especially concerned that bones be kept in good order and repair, making for some artistically macabre ossuaries.

 

If population density is sufficiently low, normal sedimentation is fast enough to bury graves so that new ones can be dug atop them, or if not quite fast enough, can be helped by burying the older sections of graveyards to make pristine new sites.

 

While cremation greatly reduces the mass and volume of corpses, if people feel it necessary to keep the ashes in perpetuity, space for even these such small packages (about the same size as a standard masonry brick) will eventually be a problem.

 

Perhaps the ultimate way to dispose of anything, from corpses to radioactive waste, is to dump it along undersea subduction zones, where, in a few thousand years, it will be forced under crustal plates, and eventually, melted into the Earth's mantle.

[Knothead]

I told my wife that I wanted her to put me in my compost pile but she said no. So I'm checking out a green burial.

 

http://www.greenburials.org/

[Lancewen]

Solyent Green? :)

 

Can you imagine finding out you've been eating human burgers, and even worse (you liked them).:wacko:

[Guest MacPhee]

Can you imagine finding out you've been eating human burgers, and even worse (you liked them).:wacko:

Plump healthy human flesh looks attractive and appetising. "Honey, you look good enough to eat".

 

This should be expected. After all, it must be the ideal food.

 

So what's wrong with eating human flesh - why do we have, or are conditioned to have, an aversion to it?

[Lancewen]

Plump healthy human flesh looks attractive and appetizing. "Honey, you look good enough to eat".

 

This should be expected. After all, it must be the ideal food.

 

So what's wrong with eating human flesh - why do we have, or are conditioned to have, an aversion to it?

 

I think with humans it's more natural than conditioned (IMO). Many years ago I used to brows the Usenets more commonly called news groups and they had a few groups about cannibalism. One of them was devoted to recipes on how to prepare and cook the various parts of the human body. Another one was devoted to how to find and buy human flesh, with the highest prices being given to newly aborted fetuses.

 

Anything I may have downloaded was lost to a hard disk crash, and those groups can no longer be found at any site that host news groups. So I can't verify what I just said. I'm not sure how real it was, but it was very entertaining from a taboo point of view.

[CraigD]

So what's wrong with eating human flesh - why do we have, or are conditioned to have, an aversion to it?

Moraly, the only objection I can think of to it is that cannibals might not necessarily wait till a person no longer need their meat to eat it. Dead people don’t need their flesh any more, and traditional burial eventually recycles it in part back into the food stream, so it’s not really anything novel. Killing people to eat them is the stuff of horror movies, and very bad mojo in nearly all moral philosophies.

 

Medically, what’s wrong with humans eating human or other primate flesh, even properly cooked to kill ordinary pathogens, appears to be that it puts one at risk of contracting a TSE. The precise pathology of these diseases is not well understood, and they’re always effectively untreatable and fatal, usually within a year or two. Very nasty, and fortunately very rare disesase, the TSEs, though among peoples who routinely eat human flesh, common enough to have folk names, like kuru.

 

:Exclamati Bottom line, eating primate flesh is dangerous for primates, and should be avoided. :Exclamati

 

In 1973, when Soylent Green (the movie, not little green crackers made of people ;)) was released, the cause of TSEs were even less well understood, so I can forgive Stan Greenberg assuming that making a safe human food source out of the dearly departed offered no challenges beyond what a simple food factory could meet, and don’t begrudge him the Nebula award he won for his screenplay.

 

In light of our better, but still incomplete knowledge of what cause TSE (the tentative consensus is that currently prions), I suspect that any practical treatment that could make human meat safe for human consumption would have to so completely damage its molecules that it would also reduce its food value – so break its proteins and lipids into their non-biological components that they’d no longer provide much nutrition. It might be possible for advance is technology to allow reliable detection of prions, so that our Soylent Green factory could discard the infected meat (a technology that would be very welcome, as it would allow us to screen blood and transplant tissue to prevent the transmission of these rare but terrible diseases), but the energy requirements of such an approach might be prohibitive.

 

On the other hand, maybe TSEs were endemically common in the world of Soylent Green – it was a depiction of pretty miserable dystopia. There’s pretty good evidence that a population exposed to them evolved resistance at least sufficient to allow them to live to reproduce, so maybe this is just a new detail in need of a new screenplay or novel. Worse SF movies than SG have been remade.

[bravox]

So what's wrong with eating human flesh - why do we have, or are conditioned to have, an aversion to it?

We are not conditioned to avoid eating human flesh, we are conditioned to eat the flesh of some kinds of animals. A really small number of them actually - except for the Chinese, who do it out of necessity, or the French, who do it out of perversion :P

 

As a matter of fact, a lot of people cannot be conditioned into eating anything other than cows and hens, no matter how hard their parents try.

Edited March 9, 2012 by bravox