For those not familiar:
“A generation ship , or generation starship , is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark or spaceship that travels at sub-light speed. Since such a ship might require hundreds to thousands of years to reach nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue traveling.”
I’m guessing all of the resources on board must be maintained. Jettisoning the first, say, thousand people to die into space would be ‘wasteful’. The water loss alone would be catastrophic, I think.
So how to make reprocessing the dead palatable to the rest of the crew?
I’d assume that a generation ship would have a large greenhouse module for growing food/producing oxygen. So…bury them and let plants grow on the graves?
Human feces would be a more efficient, predictable, and much more easily worked-with fertilizer, so if you want the dead people to help fertilize plants, it’s a better idea to have the other passengers eat them. I’d presume all waste is being recycled anyway.
Sure, but then you have to overcome a pretty hefty cannibalism taboo, which is going to be difficult at best. Burying the dead and letting them decompose into the soil may be more effecient than trying to convince a city-sized population to get on board with Soylent Green.
The one thing that’s certain is that the matter isn’t going to leave the ship’s life support system. How you reprocess the matter isn’t nearly as important as that you do it.
Well, the equivalent of “burial at sea” for a starship was to jettison the body into space inside some kind of casing (photon torpedo casing?). I remember at least one Startrek:NG episode where that was done.
The water used in this process would also be recycled in some form, either as waste water or as water vapour. Nothing can be wasted on a generation ship.
To overcome both the “waste of resources” problem and the “cannibalism” problem, make it a multi-stage composting system.
Have a “Memorial Garden” for burial. It grows plants that are strictly ornamental, but which also wilt regularly, and so must be routinely pruned and maintained. You can cut flowers that “used to be mom”, have them in your quarters for a few days, and then recycle those in the regular-for-food composting system.
All the mass gets re-used eventually, it’s an ongoing memorial for the dead, and no one has to eat their mother. Win-win-win.
Cannibalism comes with a lot of health issues, basically a bunch of variants similar to mad cow disease. Your body recycling system needs to completely denature all of the proteins in the body to prevent prion diseases or your entire crew is going to end up with mush for brains.
A side note, but leaving aside accidents, that taboo is most likely to be an issue with the first generation. But the later generations, I expect some form of natural (or more likely inculcated) tradition of service to the ship/greater good to be the forefront of any social evolution. Assuming a starting crew of mid 20s (a WAG at the best age for service / health / education / reproductive viability) it’s likely to be 2 generations down stream where the first gen crew is going to be need to be recycled. At which point, it may be moot.
I would expect once all the first and maybe second generation have passed that there will be little concern about earth based traditions and will be either new ship-based ones (which could include all of the above) or a priority on efficient use of resources, especially on the longer side of the Ark timelines. A degree of inefficiency and bowing to prior tradition is probably workable for a few hundred years given the expected technology to even be plausible. A few thousand, not so much, especially with the inevitable cultural drift over that much time.
