I’m with you. Incidentally, I took an anthropology class (Human Origins) taught by Dr. Bass (The Body Farm’s creator) back when I was at UT. He was a brilliant educator, an excellent forensics scientist, and a very funny guy. His class was definitely one of the highlights of my college career.
I want to be used to contaminate some jerk’s well.
Worms don’t eat buried corpses. I’m surprised how often this one gets a pass on the SDMB.
Withdrawn. Particularly in the case of canibalism.
Please, what else have I put up for ethical consideration besides the right of other species in general to feast on my corpse? It must be very difficult for you to read.
Insect larvae and bacteria got to eat, too.
Burial at sea? Hagfish gotta eat, same as crabs.
Personally, I think it’s more ethical for me to live forever, and thus no one would have to worry about the ethics of disposing of my body.
-XT
When I’m within a week of dying, I want them to stop feeding Shamu at Sea World. Then once I’m gone, have him do a couple stunts and then feed on my corpse in a crowd-pleasing frenzy.
Can we raffle off some tickets? I’d be there in a heartbeat, so to speak.
If we’re going to go this way, I’d suggest deep water burial to sequester the carbon for longer. If we dumped the corpse in the right spot, the carbon might stay out of the atmosphere for ages. On the minus side, getting to that spot would require a lot of fuel, so it’s gonna be a tough math problem to find the a way to do this.
Even black holes radiate away their mass eventually. As others said, no matter what we do to our dead, they eventually return to the environment.
But I think there’s a gap in logic in the OP. Consuming other lifeforms is part of how the ecosystem works, and that we consume just like them doesn’t put us on the same level. Afterall, people don’t assign the same rights to animals that they assign to humans, and even for the few people that do, they don’t apply them to all of them all animals, muchless plants, fungi, bacteria, etc. So I don’t think it necessarily follows that because we consume other lifeforms that ethically we must be consumed by them. I think a better case would be made by simply arguing that it is important to return our resources to maintain the biosphere because otherwise we’ll eventually run out of the resources we consume.
I’m also not sure what methodology the OP proposes. How does even burial not return us to the ecosystem? Sure, it might take longer than just throwing a corpse in a field to be devoured by scavengers and decompose, but you introduce a hose of other problems that way. How do we rid ourselves of the corpses of the deceased in highly populated areas? Do we just make a huge compost heap of corpses? How do we manage the pests that corpses would attract or the pollution or the diseases or even the smell? In nature, corpses would be spread out where they die so it’s not a big deal, but not so much for cities. What about the needs of individuals to grieve or any beliefs or rites they need to perform for their loved ones?
It seems to me that cremation and burial not only return the resources to the environment, but they also manage a host of other problems. The only downside is that it takes a bit longer for those resources to return, but since people are constantly dying, and have been since man started rites of death, they’re getting returned at a steady rate already. So that seems like a negligible point.
When my Grandmother was buried. they put her casket inside in a sealed metal box. The only thing that would get to eat her would be anaerobic bacteria.
Which seems so much grosser to me than being eaten by worms or scavenging animals.
I think we should do away with caskets and embalming altogether.
Sailboat. Problem solved.
Wooden caskets decompose more gradually and more, less, well, “disgustingly” than any metal safes some people seem to want.
I THINK in some states embalming is required, but I could be wrong. I do believe that caskets are required, for public health reasons. But even with embalming it’s not forever, so you’re still worm* food anyways.
*Yes, I know we don’t get eaten by worms. It’s just an expression.
I vote we christen it the Charon.
Death elevator.
Build a tube that extends from the surface down to some very deep, secluded spot in the sea. Have UPS or FedEx ship the corpses to the coast where they are loaded onto barges which deliver them to the floating ‘vestibule’. Say a few rites, tie a rock to the ‘participant’ and plop. A few hours later they come out the other end of the tube at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
And then there is always the Hunter S. Thompson/Timothy Leary method of shooting (some of) your remains into space. Now there is some carbon that isn’t coming back!
Why a tube? Sharks gotta eat too, and since we are over fishing their food resources thus jeopardizing their existence into extinction , we just might be obligated to feed them a bone or two.
We’re trying to sequester the carbon. The shark eats the corpse and uses the meat for energy, releasing CO2 into the shallow water. We want it to stay in the deep water, where it won’t enter the atmosphere for a long time.
Clearly, this is only an intellectual exercise, as there is no obvious way building a death elevator(1) will be a net gain in the carbon cycle.
(1) Incidentally, band name.
Shame about all the rocket fuel though 