The whole burial/cremation thing is a waste of good protein. Maybe it is time for Soilent Green.
I ran across this news item recently and it sparked my imagination with a Renewable Energy solution:
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Australia to open feet-first graveyard
A group of Australian farmers have won permission to open a 'feet-first' graveyard.
The eco-friendly cemetery will bury the deceased vertically to save space and in bio degradable bags in a field to be used later as pasture.
Tony Dupleix, chairman of the farmers' cooperative set up 20 years ago when the idea was first mooted, said it was a 'no fuss' alternative to traditional burials.
"When you die, you are returned to the earth with a minimum of fuss and with no paraphernalia that would affect the environment," he said.
"You're not burning 90kg of gas in a crematorium and there's no ongoing maintenance costs.
"Once the cemetery operations are complete it will go back to being a paddock, just as it looks now, with animals grazing," he said.
Bodies will be stored in a morgue in Melbourne and buried in batches of 12 to 15 in three-metre pre-drilled holes.
Vertical burials cost £600 and will be located on land at Derrinallum, west of Melbourne, reports The Age newspaper.
Dupleix said they expect to bury between 300 and 400 people a year.
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I had trouble getting to sleep that night because I was thinking of this. It occurred to me that digging really deep holes could accommodate a number of people, one on top of the other. That would seem more efficient.
Then I thought of the Peak Oil problem. Since a number of oil fields around the world are running out of oil, we will be left with a lot of really deep holes (some 10,000' deep!) and no oil left in the reservoir. Do you suppose we could top them up again? After all, oil is simply the organic remains of life millions of years ago.
If we stacked a lot of bodies end-on-end in these very deep holes, I suppose the weight of the column would compress those on the bottom quite a bit. The other thing is that most bodies are a bit too large to easily fit down the well casings so they would no doubt require processing. What I envision is something like a giant sausage-making machine with an endless chain of links sliding down the well bore.
I think it would work pretty well; you just drive your station wagon or rickshaw with grandma on the back, to a central location. After loading the body on the conveyor belt, drop your coins in the slot, say a prayer, and see Grandma off knowing you had done your bit for ecology and the oil "bidness". This is no small thing either; there are over 7
billion bodies that must be disposed of within the next 80 years, so it could have a substantial impact on our oil reserves in that time and there will always be more where those came from, kind of a renewable resource.
With all these problems finally solved, I went to sleep and slept like a baby.