My brother used to work in a cemetary and would sometimes have to dig up people. For those not in the know, a body will liquefy in a sealed container and smells real bad. Evidently it can stay runny for a long time (years?).
Let’s put a body in a typical airtight casket and put it in a concrete vault like sometimes happens in the real world.
What are the contents like after a month? a year? 10 years? 100 years? What will an archaeologist face when the box is opened in 1,000 years? I’m assuming some kind of wax? How long to get to that stage?
Mummies are deliberately treated before death to desiccate the tissues, and often packed with salt and other absorbent materials to deliberately draw any remaining liquids out.
Is this liquification process the same thing also known as “putrefication” (or “putrefaction”)?
Is it the same process that sometimes happens even in the open air?
When I lived out in the boonies, there were field mice all over the place, and the ones I trapped indoors had a tendency to be dead. Usually their little mousy bodies would just dry out. But every once in a while, one would turn into a blackish gooey STINKY slime puddle, often w/ maggots. Is this the same process as discussed in OP above? Why does it sometimes happen in open air too?
I really don’t understand this. Funeral Homes like to advocate how wonderful their airtight, hermetically sealed caskets are. Um, if I’m dead, why do I care again? Whatever happened to “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Are we trying to keep something out or keep something in? Eww.
Me? I’m going for cremation. Then you can bury what’s left. Saves time, saves space. Burn me, baby, burn!
If you mean “tell us what this links to,” then it’s just a forum convention here that “The Master Speaks” is a link to a Cecil Adams article on the topic being asked about. If that was just an opportunity to use “mystery meat” in this threat…kudos!
I’m not sure if you’re really asking a question or just making a point in a funny way, but if it’s the former, then the answer is that some people are squicked out at the thought of being eaten by worms. My MIL was like that. Doesn’t make much sense to me either, but there you have it. I think it’s weirder to think that I’m going to turn into putrefactive (is that a word?) goo and sit at the bottom of a Tupperware box for eternity, but to each their own. My mother is totally freaked out by the idea of cremation, and for some reason it weirds me out too, despite the fact that I like to think of myself as being too analytical to entertain such irrational thoughts. The more I think about it though, I think I want to go the worm food route. Worms are kinda cool, and they’re good for the soil. Come to think of it, why does it have to be incineration or liquefaction? Why are those the only two choices? Why can’t I just be composted?
I wondered about this when I went to see Napoleon’s tomb in Paris. It is a big marble sarcophagus, on a plinth under a dome, where tourists can go view it. I hate to think what is actually inside.
In the nearby snack bar, though, you could buy Napoleon shaped lollipops, which seemed both weird and sort of cool. I bought one for my daughter.
He had been buried in the conventional underground manner for about 20 years in St. Helena before they dug him up and moved him to where he is now, so he was probably pretty much as decomposed as he was going to get.
Also, I’m not sure about Napoleon’s, but in places like Westminster Abbey, the bodies are actually in sealed burial vaults underground and the things the tourists look at are simply sarcophagus-shaped memorials, so if you were to pry the lid off (assuming there actually is one) there’d be nothing to see. Considering that he went there pre-decomposed, though, he might actually be in his snazzy sarcophagus thing.
Those caskets serve no purpose other than as something for the families to spend money on. Embalming (which is a completely different process than mummification) is only intended to preserve the body long enough without refridgeration for an open casket funeral. It does nothing to preserve the body long term (& combined with a perfectly sealed casket makes it decay faster). Keeping a body in a cooler until the funeral would have the same effect; except most funeral homes charge a flat fee for embalming and a daily fee for refridigeration.
That’s probably more to do with the composition of the population of organisms living on the corpse - for example, maggots will make a stinky runny mess of a small corpse, just because they’re opening it up, and because they’re digesting and excreting it in a different form.
The same thing goes for fungi and bacteria - they will act on the corpse in different ways (think about the difference between, say, Stilton cheese and Cheddar - similar starting states, different end results - in part, due to the different micro-organisms at work.
Ultimately, you just have to accept that what grosses people out (especially regarding death and the disposition of one’s body) is usually not rational. For some uber-rational Sheldon Cooper-types this itself is difficult to accept, but that’s the way life is. Me, I find the idea of keeping a loved one’s ashes around on a fireplace mantle or somesuch to be kinda creepy, and a bit disturbing. I really don’t care much for cremation to begin with, and would rather be buried. If I was cremated I would want my ashes buried or sealed in a vault somewhere. Don’t scatter me, please, and don’t leave me sitting on the shelf next to the little porcelain cat and the snowglobe from Vermont.
Has nobody shaved a dead monkey and put it into a sealed clear acrylic box for observation? I’m thinking I may just have a webcam idea–I’ll make millions because I KNOW folks will want to see it (when they think nobody’s watching them).
We’ll need:
a mass spectrometer so we can keep tabs on the atmosphere within the box.
a pressure gauge fixed to the box
a window wiper device just in case the interior gets too fouled to see through
a shark with a laser mounted on its head
a live, shaved monkey
a very strong, clear, glass box (unless we know for sure the goo won’t eat away at the acrylic)
a scale–just to make sure the mass of the ensemble doesn’t change when the monkey dies, thereby providing evidence of a material soul
Oh, and probably some kind of temporary permit for owning a live monkey.
