People keep on dying and we keep on burying them. People keep getting born so burials have an endless supply source. But, cemetaries are forever so wont they eventually take over.
You may think its way down the road if ever an issue, but we repopulate and die at expoential rates so I forsee a problem. Maybe were to resectful of the dead.
Burn and blow, I say…
I am so bored, so I took a stab at this. My answer to the OP is in the year 2768.
I tried to do the math manually, but failed. Here’s the perl code I used instead:
Certain rather ugly assumptions have to be made, such as that birth and death rate are fixed, and that we can actually come up with an average area per grave. I also have no idea how many square miles are currently occupied by graves, so I assume it is zero.
Data is from: http://www.prb.org/pubs/wpds2000/world.htm
I thought you were kidding! Even as I read the formula I still thought you were goofing around. Nice work though! The date you gave is way sooner than I would have thought…
Answer: We won’t.
Subsidiary: Europe has solved this problem. It involves renting space. You buy a space for your stiff and he’s left to lie there for a certain amount of time. After that time is up, you have options: Exhume the meat and decide what to do from there or pay for another rental period. If you exhume, you can cremate or find another plot of land or do something else with it that is within the laws.
If this ever became a problem in America, we would be digging up plots with backhoes and dumping the corpses down incinerators, mark my words. The second we can’t build that strip mall grandma isn’t sitting so pretty in that earthen throne.
First of all, cemetaries will never take over the world. Cemeteries might, though.
Second, the world is already one big cemetery.
Third, the scenario you portrayed is impossible. Yeah, I guess if we all got a marked grave with a headstone then there might be a real estate problem eventually. However, considering that quite a few people around the world subscribe to religious beliefs that incorporate cremation into the death ceremony, and considering that, depending where you live, there are probably cemeteries underneath buildings and highways already, and considering that no one wants to live in a cemetery, I am guessing that the world will only become one big cemetery when we all die at the same time. And then there will be no one to bury us. So will that make it a cemetery or an all-you-can-eat-buffet for scavengers?
For every person who wants to be burnt (myself included) there are five+ who will be buried. And you said yourself, that no one wants to live over a cemetary(sp? FU :)) So you cant deny that this may be an issue someday…
I vaguely remember that some time ago, when world’s population was 4-5 billion people, the entire population, would occupy one half of the principality of Liechtenstein (31mi[sup]2[/sup], standing shoulder to shoulder. Then we have oceans. Then we can cremate them.
Peace
Soylent Green.
When I go, I wanna be composted. End of problem. 
[george carlin]
I don’t want to be buried.
I don’t want to be cremated.
I want to be blown up!
BOOM!
“There he goes!”
[/george carlin]
A revival of interest in Viking funerals would be nice. There was one a depiction of one not long ago in a film which starred Richard Gere and Sean Connery. I think it was Sean Connery who was put on a barge surrounded by flowers and candles and floated out to sea where he was set alight with the flame from an arrow.
I lost my original reply somehow.
I reckon the central assumption is that the graveyards will be honored ground forever.
This, sadly, is seldom the case. I went to High School on a site that had been the town graveyard, and was told that all they did was move the headstones.
Here in MD, there are cases of graveyards that have been turned via neglect into de facto illegal dumps. Valdalism of headstones eventually results in their destruction, and sooner or later someone lays claim to the “empty” land and redevelops it. I would like to know what typically happens to any bones they discover during the course of digging. Most likely, they quitely move them to another hole on the property to avoid any legal entanglements.
I know of a case where a construction crew was running some heavy excavating machinery and came up with a hopper full of skulls and bones. Turns out they’d found a long lost colonial era graveyard. I doubt they re-directed the road or whatever they were building. Perhaps they sent the remains to some school, or lerhaps they re-interred them under thwe highway. Maybe they’re still sitting in some forensic lab somewhere.
There are also cases where graves end up on what becomes through sale and subdivision private property. In this state, the owners can deny access to the relatives of the deceased.
In MD if you find any bones you MUST call the MD archaeology dept for the state. They come out and look at the site and determin what to do with it. they are supposed to come out and look at the site before the digging even begins though I don’t think they’d find much most of the time.
They don’t re-route, they actually stop work. I have heard from my arch instructors that they don’t always call and do just get rid of the bones so they don’t get behind. I’m sure if they found more than a few remains they’d call.
I once apply, I don’t know why, to sell burial plots. I asked then how long it would take until they filled up all of their land and they told me well over 100 years. I’m sure they knew enough about population growth and stuff to be able to figure that out so I’m guessing they’re right.
[Homer Simpson]
Mmmmm…people
[/Homer Simpson]
Another solution is to do the mosoleum (sp?) thing and stack the bodies above ground in sort of grave condos. I recently went to Jewish cemetary to see where my wife’s grandparents were buried and grandpa was at about eye level on the third row up (which is prime space, just like shelf space at the supermarket).
The scarey thing is that they had like 7-8 rows going up about 20-25 feet. How much would it suck to have so little money for the burial you got the top row and to visit your beloved deceased, you’d have to climb a giant ladder to stick flowers in the little vase.
I’m sure the interrment process is very nice too as a forklift comes by to stick grandma into the top story like she is a pallette full of toilet paper at Sam’s Club. 
Well, until folks get over this religious thing of all of the dead rising on the day of redemption (meant figuratively, I suspect, not literally), we’ll keep plowing them into the ground.
Certain Jewish sects are real fanatical about it, including having every piece of the body buried. Spilled blood can even be sopped up on a cloth and placed in the coffin.
Catholics are almost as obsessive, shoving everyone into the ground and when the Cemetery fills up, they dig 'em all up and shove the moldy bones into a charnel house under the church, to gather dust, scare the crap out of visitors, or to be used in bazaar bits of artwork lining church walls. (Disgusting!) Though, they call the charnel house the catacombs and don’t always store the bones intact. Skulls might be here, thigh and shin bones there, and so on, which might cause a bit of confusion if the dead do rise and they have to go fishing around for all of their parts.
Mummies were different because they figured the whole person went to heaven. Of course, during the latter half of the 18th century and the early part of the 1900s, so many mummies were found in the sands that they developed a whole commercial enterprise around them. Mummies were burned in the boilers of steam engines for fuel, mummies were ground into powder for medicine, mummies were stripped of their wrappings, which were imported by the ton to the US for paper making, mummies were tossed about and burned, some went into fertilizer and a whole bunch were shipped over here for ‘house parties’.
That was a grisly little affair where the well heeled had a drunken party based around a mummy case, then opened it, awing the guests, ripped off the wrappings and studied the desiccated mess left behind, pocketing any artifacts found. Afterwards, the body was dumped with the trash or burned in the garden weed pile.
Pleasant way to spend an evening. I guess the rising from the dead thing doesn’t apply to anyone not your own particular brand of religion, so you can kick the corpse around.
Personally, I figure cremation is the way to go, but that religious thing still nags at everyone, who seem to feel that a handful of ashes isn’t going to rise very well at the end of the world. I wonder why no religious leader has ever pointed out that it is the soul or ‘spiritual’ body which will rise. (That gets a bit contradictory also, because once you die, don’t you go to heaven, hell or purgatory? So, who’s left to rise?)
I don’t know, but I’ve seen some bodies after they’ve lain around in a coffin under the dirt for a few years or months and the movie ‘Day of the Dead’ isn’t far off. So, if I have a choice of being entombed, to mostly rot into a fetid liquid, which drains into the bottom of the coffin, ruining those over priced silken linings, to be covered with a mold the consumes your tissues, then to crumble into a shrunken, putrescent mass of bone and worm food; to lay in an over priced box, which will eventually leak and probably turn you into a slurry resembling loose s**t, or the clean, quick reduction to a mass of ashes and baked teeth to be scattered to the 4 winds, I’d take the latter.
(Man! Capitol run on sentence!)
Besides, 100 years down the road, someone will decide that a strip plaza should go well where the Cemetery is, buy the darn thing up, remove the bodies and poke them somewhere else and not be real careful about it. At that rate, eventually we’d have a catchall Cemetery about the size of Texas. The smell should be very interesting.
Very interesting, even more so if true. Happen to have any cites, AVSC916?
This should do as a starter, though most of the information came from programs on NOVA, Discovery, The Learning Channel, National Geographic – the books, not the series, and information on late British History. 
http://pages.ancientsites.com/~Nesnut_Hatshepsut/papyrus7/papyrus2.htm
Midway down the left side of the page is a good mention of unwrapping parties.
Some denominations we have here down South (I don’t recall specifically which ones) don’t believe that you go straight to heaven or hell when you die. Instead, you’re just dead. You’re buried, and you lie there for decades or centuries or however long it takes until the Second Coming, and then you will be raised from the grave to live forever in your physical body in the perfect world that Christ will bring, assuming you were a True Believer.
Well, what the hell did you expect!!! You damn Yankees burned all the schools!!!