Human Remains: Past, Present and Future

lot of cool Halloween content. And along those those lines, we have a new season of Monster Science coming out, four new episodes looking at the connections between fictional monsters and real world science. So there's one about werewolves, there's one about Big Trouble Little China. Hopefully a lot of great stuff in there. I think you'll all enjoy it. And hold on, you gotta tell me what's the science of David Lopan. Oh well, it's not so much David

Lopan as one of his minions. Okay, very explosive minion um. Just to give you a hint. Uh So, yeah, Dr Anton Jessup will look into that and and draw some interesting comparisons between that and something in the natural world. And finally periscoping, Uh, stuff to blow your mind me, Joe Christian, we will be on the periscope October twenty three attending to our build up of listener mail, which is his built up under the sands like a like a like a prespice mass just ready to blow to

the surface. So again October twenty three on that stuff to blow your mind dot com. And now let's move on with today's episode. So it's October, our favorite month. It's my favorite month. I assume it's yours. Okay, Yeah, I often get into trouble by placing I think too much emphasis on it, Like I build it up all year, and then when it comes I kind of forget that. Yes, there's extra cool stuff and the weather is hopefully getting

a little cooler. Uh, and there's Halloween. But on the other hand, all the other stuff in life is still happening and uh and isn't gonna make it this just idyllic kind of scenario. In our house, we treat Halloween the way malls treat Christmas, where like the entire month leading up to it, it's Halloween every day, So we we watched monster movies all all October. It's it's our favorite part of the year. And so it being October,

now we thought we'd talked about some corpses. Yeah, I mean it's part and partial to the holiday, right, Contemplations of death inform our our monsters are our traditions, and uh, you, you can't separate it from Halloween. So we might as well just get right down to the nitty gritty and talk about what what we do when it when a human being dies? What have we done in the past, what are we doing now, and what might we do

in the future. Yeah, so our inspiration for this episode was I think it was two weeks ago, I don't know, a while ago. Robert and I were in here one morning looking for a cool story to talk about, and my wife Rachel had sent me this worry about a tree in Ireland that got blown over in a storm and as it was blown over in the storm, it pulled up a large clod of topsoil with its roots, and hanging there in the roots was half of a human skeleton, and the other half was still left in

the ground below the tree. But a tree had grown up out of this dead body that had supposedly been somebody probably murdered in the Middle Ages, and that the case. Yeah, he you know, he was probably killed either in combat or some sort of you know, bloodthirsty Irish duel, who knows. But then you buried in a shallow grave, and over time a tree grows there or adjacent to it, and when that tree falls over rips up a portion of

his skeleton remains. Yeah, so what began is grizzly into kind of oddly beautiful with the tree coming up out of the ground. And and we found out while looking a bit further into the story in this topic of trees growing out of human corpses, that some people are actually seeking this on purpose. And so that got us thinking about the whole idea of of new ways of dealing with our dead. Yeah. I mean, there are lots of weird things you could do with the dead body.

I mean, you might just take a corpse and put it in a rocking chair on your front board, let it scare the trick or treaters, or you might throw it into a volcano, or I don't know, what are some other good things to do. Well. I always like the danger diabolic model, where you just where you're just sealed in gold, right, just alive, just mummified as a golden statue. Oh that's a really good one. So it's like the inverse of the person who gets molten gold

poured down his throat. Yes, yeah, yeah, And you know it ties in, of course, our need with a lot of burial practices, to to make something offous that will stand the test of time. We have died, our name is going to die. But hey, show me the solid

gold statue of me. Nobody's gonna come around and claim that and reuse that those materials, right, I mean, wouldn't that be ironic if the Great Memorial to the to the Dead Beloved Leader ends up in the electronics of the future there go, I was just thinking about that. I end up getting broken down again, and then my gold is used in various little wearable gadgets, so I

gotta make a catalytic converter, come on. But yeah, anyway, So one of the things that we found is interesting looking into this is how much some of the new and exciting ways of disposing of our dead actually mimic some of the oldest ways that we're sort of coming full circle, and so I think we should start by

looking at some ancient practices for disposal of the dead. Yeah, I mean, first of all, just thinking, like the most basic scenario possible, just some primordial human wandering around out in the waist waste plans, you know, dressed in furs,

he or she keels over dead. What happens. Nature takes its course, decomposition, insects moving in, laying their eggs, sat scavenging, animals coming in, tearing it apart, the Sun, the elements, all of it working to just erase that body from the face of the Earth, like all signs of it.

I mean, it's one of those, uh, the situations when you look at the fossil record, Like, one of the reasons that the fossil record is inherently incomplete is because you have to have a certain set of conditions met for the skeletal remains of an ancient beast to fossilize and therefore stand the test of time um and potentially wind up being discovered by explorers or paleontologists. Yeah, definitely, most terrestrial animals do not die under conditions that are

conducive for fossilization. Yeah. They come from nothing and they return to nothing. And it just is all part of the the recycling UM. And so we see some some of our our older models of dealing with the dead, you see them UH working in synergy with this, with this kind of recycling of the body UM. One of my favorites, of course is his sky burial or celestial burial UM, which is a form of exposure burial or excarnation,

if you will. The most famous example of this UH is probably the Tibetan model, which is called tour or the giving of alms to the birds. So and this is this is when you have the body of a deceased individual and it's um essentially dismantled, taken apart by a chosen individual so that it can be quickly consumed by the vultures. And there are a number of scenarios that play into into this. Okay, for starters, just the Tibetan environment. The ground is um is rocky or it's frozen.

It's so available soil as at a premium. So any any available soil in the Tibetan landscape, you're you're probably using it to produce food. You can't waste a lot of it on on burial grounds. And imagine you're farming or grazing your animals on it right now. Meanwhile, you have natural scavengers in the era you have you have some wolves, you have carrying hungry uh um lamba guyers and vultures that are unting the air overhead. We'll hold on.

What's a lambur guy Oh, lambur guyer is wonderful um scavenging bird that depends on on the bones and I'll take the bones up to a high height, drop them, let the drones that the bones crack open, and then go down and uh and have at them. So that's genius. Yeah, I mean, it's banned and perhaps serves as some of the inspiration for the practice of sky burials about about

to relate here. The other aspect is that the while we tend to associate the bat today, you know, very strongly with Tibetan Buddhism, but the region's earlier bond religion was animistic and viewed non humans as spiritual beings. So in this case, you would have you know, it's not just a scavenging bird, it's a it's a holy animal, right, and so it's it's all the more appropriate that it

consumed the dead. That kind of practice seems to me like it's especially acceptable to people if you view the animals that are scavenging as holy in some way, because we don't really tend to look at vultures that way. I think maybe we should, but but we think of vultures is kind of like nasty creatures, I don't know, like sewer rats or something. But if you look at a vulture as a as a noble beast, having to

consume your flesh seems like a cool thing. And yeah, even if there's some defensive vomiting involved, Yeah, we spent our whole lives wanting to to fly, and hey, here's your chance in the belly of the vulture. Um. But so that the approach here is kind of like that of the dismantling that I mentioned with the lambur guyer. So, yeah,

you have a period of mourning and prayer. Then the body is blessed, it's cleaned, it wrapped in white cloth, and finally the spine is broken and this allows the body to be folded into a smaller bundle, and then it's carried to a sacred burial site on the back of a close friend or a family member. And then the actual sky burial itself falls to either a rogyapa whose work is uh, it's more straightforward rendering of the corpse, or a lama burial master who has a monk, recites prayers,

doing the ritual in addition to breaking the body. So we're talking about taking the body, putting it face down on the stones. Um. So it's not literal burial, no, No, it's it's more like I am bearing you well in the sky, in the vulture, in the birds and the scavengers that will take off. But there's there's some aid applied here. So talking about using a flaming knife for axe, cutting off the hair, then slicing up the body, eviscerating it,

chopping off the limbs. Uh, just a ritual dismantling of the body. Um, to allow easier consumption by the birds.

So you just don't have a bunch of dead bodies lingering about and then um, I mean they'll even go so far as to pulverize the remaining bones with a hammer, then mixing them with like a barley flower so that the birds can easily consume that as well, basically doing the lamberguier's job for Yeah, but it's but it's beautiful and it's its way, you know, because I mean it's it's very different from especially the modern Western idea of of bearing the body and this little tomb and embalming it,

which we're gonna get into all that shortly. Um, but it's more in keeping with that the basic reality of death. Well, it's it's not only more in keeping with the natural process of decomposition, but it's actively encouraging it. It's going

in the opposite direction of embalming. So if you look at modern Western burial practices with caskets and involving as essentially trying to prevent the onset of decomposition or put up a big halt sign for nature, this is not only allowing nature to take its course, but it's trying to hasten nature's access to the body. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's saying, let's speed this up a bit. Because of the human bodies are fairly large body, uh, you know, compared to a lot of creatures out there, So it

does their fauna. Yeah, we are and uh and there are a lot of us and be if you have a region that's engaging in this kind of sky burial, you know, it would be easy for the bodies to build up at these sacred sites. Now, another famous model of exposure burial is uh the Zoroastrian model, uh, the

scoff Sky burial via a Tower of Silence. This is so interesting and cool and also the Tower of Silence has always sounded to me like the name of a great strategy game that doesn't exist, Like you should have Chess and Go and Tower of Silence. I was thinking like a Dungeons and Dragons module, Like we're gonna play the Tower of Silence is a classic campaign uh adventure here, you know, just because it sounds like a place you would go and encounter a wizard but gelatinous cube. But

but the Tower of Sunds. You actually still find these in modern day Iran. Uh. This form of exposure burial is still practiced up in parts of India. And the model for this Tower of Silence basically you have a this cylindrical tower looks like a big stone drum um and on top of the the roof slopes slightly in towards the center, you know, and keep things from falling off because that's where you arrange the bodies of the dead in three concentric rings from men, women, and at the

innermost region the children. And uh, basically you just let the sun, insects and scavenging birds do their work stripping the unclean body. And that's key here because in the Zoroastrian worldview, the dead body is just an inherently unclean thing. That is um that not only is it susceptible. I mean, in reality, of course, their diseases associated with the dead body, but within this uh, this magical worldview that also you

could have an evil spirit enter into the body. The the just nastiness of the body could could not only make its surroundings physically unclean, but spiritually unclean. So like this, they just want the natural elements to take care of that blight as soon as possible. So they just let the scaven to do their work, and then the remaining bones are taken and stored in an assilary. I love the idea here that nature is a sort of cleansing

agent too. Yeah, so it's not just allowing nature to do its work, but it's allowing nature to do something useful for you, you know, to to not only get rid of this uh, this stinking and uh and potentially disease causing mass of flesh, but to potentially remove spiritual danger. Yes, totally. Now, of course, in the ancient world, we don't want to say that it was all natural and stuff, because some people in the ancient world had very similar ideas to

the modern embalming mentality. Yeah, I mean the obvious example here is Egyptian mommification, which Christian and I just did a big episode about. I think by the kind of airs it will be like the episode before it. Uh So go back and listen to that if if you're interested. But even that model, even this model that eventually evolves to the point where elaborate means are being taken to ensure that the body remains in kind of like a

lifelike state for all eternity. It's its origin still lie in the natural process of decomposition or the natural mummification of this in this case of the body, because the earliest models of Egyptian burial that you find there's there's no casket, there's no housing, it's just a few belongings and a dead body buried in the sand and in

the dry sand. This is where you end up with these really the incidental uh preservation of internal organs, the crisping of the skin, um the natural mummification of the body. And then it's only as their funeral practices evolved they so they start throwing in caskets and other enclosures, and then they're interfering with the natural process that had just been a part of living and dying in that environment. Then they return to mummification as a means to to

reclaim what was happening naturally. Yeah, that's interesting. I've never thought about it that way. But we could think about decomposition not as a feature of the animal that has died, but as a feature of the environment that it dies in, or at least wherever its body is stored. I mean, I suppose you could take a body from one environment to another. But yeah, if you are in ancient Egypt or at least a very dry, sandy desert, part of it,

mummification is almost a natural process. Yeah. Yeah, and it's it's really like the the mummification as we think about the unnatural mummification, the the funeral mummification, it simply means to reclaim the natural process. Yeah. And then of course we've got cremation, right. This is something that's popular now in the modern world, and it has existed for a long time, though it's in different cultures, come in and

out of fashion over the millennia. Cremation just means, of course, burning the body into ashes, and it's existed for thousands of yours as a funerary practice. We find evidence of it going back to the Stone Age. Just one example of very ancient cremation. And is this skeletal remains found in Australia known as Lake Mungo One or the Lake Mongo Lady, discovered in nineteen sixty nine by Australian archaeologists. Have you heard about this? It's very interesting, So more

than twenty thousand years ago. And I phrase it that way because I've seen wildly conflicting dates on this could be around twenty thousand years ago, forty thousand years ago, we're up to sixty thousand years ago, and I think, uh, this seems to reflect a debate about the dating of these remains. But I think the most agreed upon date now is about forty thousand years ago. I could be wrong about that anyway. At that time there was a civilization living near Lake Mungo in Australia, and and the

Mongo lady was one of these people. Evidence shows that her body was cremated, but not just cremated, It was burned and then the leftover bones were crushed and then burned again before being buried. And this definitely, to me indicates some kind of ritual. But what did it mean. I don't know if anybody has any good speculation about this, but it's fascinating to imagine what would cause this. I mean, can you imagine this being done out of respect for

a dead loved one. It might have been some kind of ritual along those lines, or it could have been to prevent the returning from beyond the grave of a

of a haunting or something like that. Well, you know, at heart, they're using the technology of fire to dispose of the dead, and maybe we can sort of compare that to the more modern approaches where it's like, oh, well, this is a technological, a modern cultured means of disposing of the dead, and therefore I can get behind it as opposed to just you know, wolves eating a dead

loved one. And so you know that this is this is like the high tech means of the day, Like we're not this is not just going to be a burial. This is not going to be just left in the woods for animals. We're going to use our greatest technological achievement, our mastery of fire, to do nature's job for it. Yeah, and I think we should definitely not fall into the trap of thinking like, oh, what a bizarre funeral practice they had were more advanced now. I mean, look at

all the strange stuff we do now. I mean, funeral practices change over time, and this is what they did for some reason. Yeah. I mean when I was talking about ancient Egyptian mummification with Christian were many times we're like, yeah, this is this sounds grotesque and weird to an outsider, Uh, you know, across time and space. But is it really that different from what goes on inside a mortuary today

with the involving of a corpse. Not really. I mean I can't imagine anything weirder and grosser than modern evolving But anyway, So more about cremation. Cremation was practiced in parts of Asia on and off throughout history. Hinduism has actually traditionally viewed cremation is the proper ritual for the body of a dead adult. So they had cremation ceremonies called antimas sanscar I apologize if I'm pronouncing that wrong, or the anti s d and those are sort of

meaning the last rites or the last sacrifice. And this is one of the sixteen life rituals of Hinduism. So it was believed that when you performed cremation on a dead adult Hindu that it sort of ushered the soul into the next life. Yeah. And that's, of course and an important fact to keep in mind when looking at any funeral model, particularly in uh In, when Hinduism and Buddhism is the essential journey into the next phase of existence. Yeah.

And I also found several sources saying there's evidence of ancient cremation practice in China going back to eight thousand b C. And that cremation seems to have often been an accepted practice in Buddhist societies. In Western civilization, it's a little different. So the pagan Skandinavians were all about burning their dead. They loved some cremation until those societies largely converted to Christianity in the later Roman period and then the Middle Ages. Because then you're having this idea

of not only resurrection but a physical resurrection of the dead. Yeah, and Christian and Jewish theology has differed on this, and I'll say something about that in a minute. We can see examples of cremation in Greek literature, like if you look back at the Iliad, So it's a ritual cremation as an honor extended to heroes and great leaders. And this may have actually emerged as a response to necessity

for cremation in wartime conditions. So imagine you're having a big battle with somebody you know, on on alien soil and a great Greek hero falls on the battlefield, and the war is still going on, and you want to you want to honor the hero, but you can't take him home at the moment, and you don't want to bury him on foreign soil, So you have a funeral of flames, and then you carry the ashes back after the war is over, the ashes or the bones or

something like that. And this may have caused cremation to be associated with a the valorous elite of society, and the same thing seems to have happened in ancient Romes. A ritual cremation was seen as this honorable, prestigious thing to do with the body, and thus it became very popular. Well, I mean you're talking, we're talking about skybarrow earlier, right, and you are physically becoming one with the birds that

ascend into heaven. Like here you get to ascend into heaven or at least up into the sky as a pillar of smoke. You know. It's it's it's beautiful and cosmic in its own way. Yeah, And of course with both the Greeks and the Romans, there are other stages to this ritual beyond just the burning, Like there are stories of uh, of the bones being collected after the burning and then maybe washed with something nice like oil or wine and then stored in some appropriately stately receptacle.

But then after a while in the Western world, cremation started to go out of styles. So some theological strains of Christianity and Judaism have historically opposed cremation on religious or cultural grounds. Uh. This wasn't always necessarily the case, and many Christians and Jews are totally fine with cremation today.

It just depends on which subset of theological beliefs you might have, And cremation remained pretty unpopular and uncommon in the West, except for you know, extenuating circumstances, like when you had a bunch of plague victims you had to get rid of or something. And it stayed that way until the late eighteen hundreds when some influential doctors in Britain and the United States started advocating cremation again and um it, though definitely with a different method than the

traditional great Pagan funeral. This was more like what we see with modern cremation today, where the body is put into a heated chamber and then the tissues are reduced to ash and the bones are then ground into a fine powder, very high temperature technological burn, really close to just I mean, it's it's great to put a body on a on a boat and then shoot it with the flaming arrow, but to demand that level of archery skill on the part of the average that has been

it is too much. It's embarrassing to miss, but it's hard to miss getting the body into the into the chamber. You just kind of roll it on in and then of course, in recent years cremation has been on the rise. Yes, yeah, And we're actually gonna run through some of the stats on that here in a second. But I guess to close out just sort of ancient models on top of what we mentioned. Yes, you saw burials in the ground, and and and really I think that is still in

keeping with the idea of decomposition. Right. Let decomposition happen in the ground, but where I don't have to see it, and then let me I'll put a big stone over it because I don't want to see it, which means I don't want to see wolves running around with pieces of my loved ones, you know. And of course those burials were very diverse too, just like we'll be talking about the ones today. I think some were probably much more natural, where the body is wrapped in a shroud

or cloth and then buried and allowed to decompose. Others had rock tombs and stuff like that. I think you can just get increasingly carried away as a culture, particularly if you begin to see more and more that individual is still a lit because it's a it's a tricky areas. As I mentioned in the modification episode, that person is not your loved one anymore. It's not a person anymore. It's a corpse, but it still looks like them. It's still them on a physical level. And you want to

treat it with respect. Yeah, and to bring back Christianity and Judaism again. Sometimes this can be complicated by theological beliefs, because some people might have a belief that says the body is actually important for the afterlife, Like some forms of Judaism and Christianity will look at that body and say, well, that body is eventually going to be resurrected one day,

and you need to keep the body intact for that event. Meanwhile, in Hinduism and Buddhism, where you have the where you have the model of reincarnation, then that individual has just has moved on to a different form, to a different realm, and therefore the body is just worthless at this point. Yeah, yeah, there's more of a spiritual afterlife and rebirth. Yeah, So what a funeral practices look like in in at least

the United States today. Else, I imagine for a lot of our particularly US listeners, we probably don't have to tell you. You've probably seen it in your life, just at least what it, what it looks like, what the traditions consist of. But it's interesting, even if you've dealt with it in your life, how much you don't actually see Oh yeah, I mean, we are pretty far removed from the physical process of death these days too. I mean, to really do a staggering degree, and it ultimately makes

I think death more shocking when it occurs. Um. But just just to put some of the numbers behind what's happening. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, UH funeral homes in the in the USA for two thousand fifteen, we have nineteen thousand, three hundred ninety one of them, and that's down from nineteen thousand, four hundred and eighty six just in two thousand fourteen, So we see a decline every year. UM, fewer of these of these funeral homes,

and most of these funeral homes are family owned. I'm wondering how much the average funeral costs, because in a lot of my research for this episode, I saw some numbers that were very it seemed very high to meet. Some people were saying, oh, ten thousand dollars for a funeral. I mean, yeah, I think that's probably the high end.

According to to the National Funeral Directors Association, the medium cost of a of a funeral for two thousand twelve was seven thousand and forty five dollars um, and I've seen some more recent stats that push that up to around eight thousand for today. So um, you know, think

of that. It's just a general sort of framework. You can probably go lower, you can definitely go higher, you know, especially you know you're dealing with prime burial real estate, if you're dealing with the most expensive model of cast get available, which might be the worst. And we'll get into that. But yeah, another thing is I think comparing burial versus cremation the primary means of disposal of body

in the West today. Like I said, cremation started to come back on the scene in the late eighteen hundreds, but it still wasn't very popular, is very slow to pick up, right, but it's really been picking up in recent years. So according to the stats from the National Funeral Directors Association in two thousand five, burial accounted for sixty one point four percent, cremation thirty two point three. Still, that's a hefty number of creat creat of cremations, right

two thousand fifteen. This year this is they're they're projecting the cremations actually UM tip the scale to forty eight point five percent versus forty five point six percent for burial. So we see cremation in ten years, cremation becoming UM slightly more popular, and they project that if this the rate continues, by twenty we'll see cremation accounting for seventy one percent versus twenty three point two percent for burial. So well, I can definitely think of one reason this

might be emerging, which is lack of real estate. Right, That's that's definitely definitely one fact or. And I think you can also factor in just more diverse backgrounds for residents of the United States, either you know their actual cultural background or um you know various ideas about about

about funeral rights that they have absorbed from other cultures. However, I do have to say that you know, we're gonna talk a little bit more about cremation in a bit and some of the problems with cremation, and I feel like that could play a role in undermining this projected UM rise continued rise of crematory practice. But back to

your point about real estate UM. Indeed, a two thousand thirteen study from York University Semitary Cemetery Research Group suggested nearly half of the cemeteries in England could fill up entirely in the following two decades. So I know, I've seen Josh and Chuck do some video while back about cemetery real estate. I think it was in New York and how it's just so high end demand and so

expensive it's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean it, simply put, there are a lot of us on the earth at any given point that are alive, and if you start counting our populations of the dead, that's an even more staggering number. You just can't continue to say, all right, this plot of ground belongs to this person for all eternity. You're limited ground. Yeah, you have to fall, you have to You have to go with different models, either the reuse

of grave plots and then storing the ashes away. I've seen some really fascinating models out of Japan where you essentially have, you know, a mausoleum storing facility and you can go to a chamber and it will like a machine will bring the urn to you. So, um, it's kind of like a combination between a mausoleum and some sort of uh, you know, um coin operated convenience machine. I'm thinking of the millions of pods, like the scene in the May turps where he wakes up and yeah,

hold one out and bring it to you. What's the most effective way to store this these remains and then facilitate visiting the remains and honoring the remains, right, Yeah, serialized shelving. Now this brings us to embalming in a Again, I need to point out that embalming, of course, has been around for a long time, even though in some of the ancient Egyptian models of mummification involved varying degrees

of embalming. Yeah, but if you think of embalming as the traditional Western way of of burial, you might actually be wrong. They're depending on what you mean by traditional, because actually the way we embalm corpses today, you know, most corpses in the United States, is not all that old of a practice, right. I've heard that it's more

linked to the Civil War period. Indeed, Yeah, particularly to one individual, doctor Thomas Holmes, who introduced chemical embalming out on the battlefields during the Civil War, because obviously at the time you have a tremendous amount of Americans dying on American soil though typically you know, far from far from home. So in order to return that body to the family and return it in a way that it's

still preserved enough for burial. And again keeping in mind uh Western Christian models um of of of of of resurrection and physical resurrection, you know, the importance for the body to remain intact in some way, shape or form, uh, in order to honor that and potentially make a little money.

I've seen some some very critical um views on Dr Thomas holmes innovation here he introduced embalming the bodies and the preservative chemical of choice from about eighteen eighty to nineteen ten, including for Holmes himself was the use of arsenic. Oh no, yeah, which of course is is a poison as well as a de choice for embalming a dead body. Well, surely arsenic was replaced with something that's not as harmful. Yeah, Because the thing is, you're filling this body with poison

and you're depositing it in the ground. Of course, the poison is going to get out of the body. Now the body, the poison is in the ground, the poison is potentially in the water and not just contained within the cemetery but also leaching out into the area surrounding the cemetery. So yes, we eventually that was replaced, but we replaced it with formaldehyde, which the Environmental Protection Agency

currently list is a probable carcinogen. And each year in the United States alone, enough embalming fluid UH is pumped into the earth these corpses to feel eight Olympic sized swimming pools. That is disgusting. Well, let's let's talk about how it works. Okay, Well, I'm just gonna summarize here, and this is from actually how Stuff Works article How embalming Works. It's an excellent one of our cloud as articles there. Check it out if you want a more

informed journey. But goes down like this body's place on a table, bathed and claint. Sounds good. That's pretty much every funeral practice ever. Right. Yeah. So next we find that embalming fluid gets injected into the arteries through a tube connected to an embalming machine. I don't know what that machine looks like, but it sounds kind of aggressive.

You've seen phantasm and looks like okay, yeah. Anyway, they say that the fluids a combination of water and preservative chemicals, which would be like formaldehyde like we talked about a minute ago. And then because the chemical dehydrates and hardens the tissue. The fluid's presence inside the body works as a preservative by making the deceased and unsuitable host for bacteria and other organisms. And this slows the decomposition because

it just makes the body an inhospitable place in the world. Yuh, all right. Next, the amount next is important and not The amount of fluid required through all steps varies based on a case by case analysis, but on average, an embalmer needs to use a gallon or three point eight liters of embalming solution for every fifty pounds or twenty two point seven of body weight. That is so much for amalde hyde. Now, so they've got to take the blood out right yep, So the blood by by blood? Yea,

how comes the blood? Then the vessels are tied off and the incisions are sutured and closed. So I'm just closing any opening that remains there. The next you got to treat the internal body cavity. You do that by removing the liquids and gases and adding more of that embalming fluid. Yep. They need wash that body, you dress it up and of course apply cosmetics. This need be

and obviously depending on the nature of death. There may be additional purely cosmetic procedures that have to take place if you're going to have the body be viewed, uh, you know, in a very formal way. Yeah. Now, in the standard Western funerary practice today, once the embalming is done, you get the coffin right and go straight to the casket, so it is Dracula's bed. You you know what a coffin is, You've seen one before, but just to be clear,

it's a box. It's usually made of wood or metal, and you place the dead body inside the box for burial. So they range from very basic like the pine box and the sort of as a light as I lay dying since and then you've got the elaborate, expensive ornate boxes with tropical woods that are yeah, you know, some people want them. I guess. The word coffin actually comes

from the Greek and the Latin coffin us, which means basket. Okay, well this was This makes me think of the Egyptian model again, like the the evolution of that, because first it came just bare bodies thrown into the into a pit, and then they're wrapping them in something and eventually you're using a basket, and that's the evolution there into more traditional casketry. Yeah, the modern sarcophic guests. But but why coffins,

Like why even have a coffin? So I think the ideas they serve as a basic type of barrier between the body and the elements or nature, and though they're typically not creating any kind of perfect seal, they slow the interaction between inside and outside, even though that's gonna happen eventually, because I mean, decomposition comes from without and within, Like some of the first things that happen are your your insides basically falling apart and rebelling and digesting itself.

The bacteria inside you become opportunistic, they see a chance and they start showing down. And I guess the idea of slowing the rate of decomposition is a psychological comfort to some of the bereaved, thinking that will it'll just prevent I don't know that the corruption of the body

of the dead loved one. I mean, I guess there is some idea associated with mummification and embalming that you're somehow preserving the dignity of the dead person by keeping them as long as possible from beginning to look like a dead person. Yeah, and I think it's important here to one thing I read and um, I think it was the History of Hell by Alice Kate Turner. I believe it's the author, uh that most people don't have

like a worldview about death in the afterlife. They'll be sort of like a primary idea that you adhere to, but then you'll still also carry around other models in your head simultaneously. So I might be the type of person who, um has a very safe, secular idea of what happens when you die, that you just decompose and and then you're in the grave, but then I'm never

really sure. Yeah, or it's like at some point you still have like this I d that you came up with that you grew up with about about an afterlife, or maybe you really like a particular magical model that involves ghosts or what happened, so that model is still kicking around. So when you're engaging with the dead body, yet you're not only pulling out your core belief system, the one that you you know would put on a poster, but you're also engaging with these these other models that

are competing in the background. Yeah. And then of course there's also the widespread rationale that goes the other way. It says it's going to shield the external environment from being contaminated by the corpse. That could be especially important if you have pumped the corpse full of poisonous chemicals

like from aldehyde. So people selling funeral services have sometimes claimed to offer coffins with greater and greater levels of security in the form of protective caskets, with something like a rubber gasket to seal the body off from the environment, as if this were desirable for some reason. And um, even if that kind of thing appeals to you, you don't want to seal a coffin too tightly because the decaying body produces gas, and if you don't allow for

ventilation of this gas, the coffin can literally explode. This happens. I read a Washington Post st article about this, saying that some of these protective coffins really can cause this to happen. But then to prevent that, some of the so called protective coffins were created with semi permeable seals that allowed the coffin to burp as gas accumulates the burping casket. I like it, and then outside the casket you might also have another layer of protection, which would

be these concrete burial vaults. This is an area that I really wasn't that familiar with tell um a my dad died and then be I wrote a short story involving a body coming out of a grave when I really had to sit down and realize, oh, yeah, there there are two different layers one would have to bust out off. Yeah, And I think you'll find these in a lot of graves today. From what I've read. Their

main function is cosmetic. It's to protect the appearance of funeral grounds by preventing settling of the grave pit over time. So as a coffin and its contents began to decompose, they you know, they there's a vacuum of space basically in the dirt sinks down, Yeah, sunken graves. I spent part of my my childhood living in like really rural Tennessee near Kentucky Lake, and there were some old family

cemeteries in the woods. The houses have been moved away ages ago because the flooding of the area for the damn But but you'd go out there and there would be these old grave sites and you knew there were grave sites because of the sunken graves where the body and the casket or whatever it was down there has just has flattened out. And uh, and so you just have this little dip that's creepy. You're saying, not even

a headstone or with a headstone. Um, I feel like some of these head headstones, but not like really fancy ones, you know. Um, And I guess I can see where that would be a troubling idea because it it sends that very very direct message of absence of there's something gone, there's something depleted, that person that you loved is no longer here, and look here is the sunken grave to suggest that even physically they are no longer a part of this world. Yeah. And now, of course forces other

than time and decomposition can also cause this. It can be a problem if a cemetery doesn't have concrete burial vaults on all of its coffins, because what if they need to drive the back ho over the cemetery grounds to dig out a grave and it causes the earth to collapse. That's a problem also. So so you've got to have these things if you want your symmetry grounds to you know, continually look flat and nice and not have collapsing areas, or there might be other solutions, but

this is traditionally been a solution. So what is the impact of all all of this casketry? Well in grave Matters a journey through the modern funeral industry to a natural way of burial. The author Mark Harris says, on average, ten acres of cemetery ground contains enough coffin wood to build forty houses, almost one thousand tons of casket steel, twenty thousand tons of vault concrete, and enough toxic chemicals

to fill a private swimming pool. I like this. It's like a backyard swimming pool, not an Olympic swimming pool. I love the swimming pool. As a standard measurement of foulness. Is that one of the is that one of the measures on wolf from alpha? It may be, Yeah, I think so, I forget how it it converts into metrics, but yeah, okay, So that's some of the impact of of burial embalming. Putting in a casket or a vault

and then burying it. It's not necessarily the most environmentally friendly way to do things, certainly not the cheapest, and there there are these problems. But also there are problems with cremation, right yeah. I mean the big one of course carbon emissions, because you're just burning a lot of stuff. Um. And also noting it's not just a matter of oh well, here's a body, I'm gonna catch it on fire, or here's a body in a casket, let's catch it on fire.

You've got to produce the heat necessary to burn that body up, which means the use of fuel of some kind. So there's an added cost there. There's an added uh uh, there's an added emission cost there as well. And on top of that, you have all these bodies that are being burned up that have mercury in their tooth filling. So when you burn that up, you have the addition of mercury pollution. Oh man, that's gross. And I've got

to read this quote from a BBC article. I read quote mercury from amalgam vaporized in crematory a is blamed for up to six of UK airborne mercury emissions. That's all from dead bodies. That is crazy. Um. Now, there are green crematories out there, um. And however, most of the green aspects of what's going on here are related to just, for instance, storing the dead up until they have enough to just deify the high heating costs, so like not burning one at a time, right, yeah, like

wait until you have several. They need to make the most out of your fuel use. Because remember we're talking about necessary temperatures of six eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit eight d seventy one to nine eighty two degrees celsius necessary to burn the bodies up completely. It's the crematory equivalent of car pooling. Yeah, yeah, And and it makes sense, you know, if you're gonna you're gonna use this, this, this level of fuel to burn a body, go ahead

and burn up several oneove and set it up. Now.

In terms of figuring out the carbon emissions aspect of this, I did find an interesting two thousand thirteen study from the Desert Research Institute that ACTO actually looked into the pollution of crematory traditions in South Asia, where again, you know, we mentioned the Buddhist and Hindu models and how prevalent it is over there, and their findings were, first of all, that funeral pyre emissions contain sunlight absorbing organic carbon aerosols

or brown carbon. And uh, and here's a quote, uh driving home the findings too, said the researchers estimate the mean light absorbing organic aerosol mass emitted from funeral pires to be equivalent of approximately of the total um carbon aerosol mass produced by anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels and ten percent of biofuels in the region. So it's a significant contribution. Yeah, no doubt. Now I can hear what you're probably back there thinking, because our listeners always love

to suggest this option. You've got a problem with a thing on Earth, let's say it's radioactive waste, shoot it into space. Shoot it into space, they say. Now, if we've got problems with dead bodies on Earth piling up, you know, if you, uh, you want to bury them according to proper burial practices that are enforced by most cemetery as well, that's going to use a ton of concrete and steel and take up all this space and leak toxic chemicals into the ground. You want to burn them,

it's going to release mercury and carbon emissions. So why don't we just shoot our dead bodies into space? So many problems with that model. Yeah, well, actually there there are huge problems with that model. But there are private companies that will dispose of your remains in space for a f D fee. If you want to pinch a penny, you can just have your cremains transported into space during a brief suborbital flight and then return to Earth for disposal.

But that sounds kind of Are any of these companies offering full body disposal in space? They not that I know of. They might if the price were right, because that is going to be a heck of a price. Let me explain. So there are several companies that offer space burial packages. One of them is called Elysium Space. No, can you give me a little spacey music too? To play under while I read some of their materials? Beautiful okay?

From their materials, Elysium Space offers families the ability to send a symbolic portion of cremated remains into the eternal wonders of the night sky forever in remembrance of our dearly departed. Through partnerships with the most reliable space transportation companies, Elysium Space provides unique celestial services. The Shooting Star Memorial Lunar Memorial and Milky Way Memorial to create an everlasting tribute and connective experience with those who have gone before us.

The Lunar Memorial, they will actually send your remains to the move, so they claim. But we'll we'll get into this. So first things first, this is not talking about blowing your entire dead body out the airlock so that you know pieces of it are going to end up smacking into the observation window of the I s s here. What we're really talking about is something I might call cremation plus. So you are cremated. That is the method

of disposal for your body. So we're keeping all the carbon emissions and everything, and then a quote symbolic portion of the ashes can be transported to space on one of these scheduled launches. Why just a symbolic portion, Well, it's because of cost. According to Thomas Sivett, the founder of Elysium Space, cremation usually leaves behind about six pounds of ashes. I looked at other places saying that the average cremation goes from three to nine pounds of stuff

left over, and that's a lot of ashes. The cost of sending cargo into space into lower thorbit is calculated on a by weight basis. So if it's ten thousand dollars per pound of payload and you want to send six pounds of ashes into space, that's a sixty thou dollar journey. Would would the where would be exterment? If if intermin is burial in the grave, what would sending

ashes into space b that? Yeah? Anyway, companies like Elysium Space would be limiting this symbolic portion of your remains to a quantity more in the realm of a ram or something. I wonder if you if you knew an astronaut, and granted it is a very small group of individuals, but if you knew somebody that was going into space, could you potentially bribe them to to smuggle up a

symbolic sample of some ashes? Maybe you could. I don't know, I mean, I know they have limited amounts of cargo they can bring with them, but maybe maybe would be worth their while to leave the iPod at home if you you know, if you grease their palm enough to replace it with a similar package of ashes. Well, that's supposedly how the moon exhibit got to the Moon. Did you ever read about this? Oh, there's potentially a tiny

art exhibit on the Moon. I think it's disputed whether it's actually there or not, but it was this tiny art exhibit involving some kind of weird drawing of Andy Warhol's that looks like it is supposed to be a penis and uh and this tiny, tiny wafer of an art exhibit was supposedly left on the Moon by a team of astronauts who walked on the surface. Look it up. There's there's a funny Wikipedia page about it. But anyway, the package is offered by Elysium Space. This is great.

So they've got the shooting Star memorial, that's one, and that puts that symbolic portion of your loved ones remains into orbit quote only to end this celestial journey as a shooting star. This is a nice way of saying that you're released into orbit and then your orbit decays until you burn up upon re entering the atmosphere, and then technically you're a shooting star, because that's what a shooting star is, something zipping and burning through the atmosphere

as the reinners. Right. So, according to an article I read in Slate about this, the capsule will of course be way too small to see while it's in orbit. But Elysium has talked about creating an app that will let you track your loved ones remain so you can see where they are in the sky. So maybe then here's the one you asked about, the Lunar Memorial. This delivers that little graham of your remains are, however much to the surface of the Moon. Pretty cool, all right.

They say it's nine thousand and fifty dollars for the first fifty takers, and then it's eleven, nine hundred and fifty for anybody after that, and then they've got the Milky Way Memorial, which is I think the prices to be determined there, which would send that little part of your ashes into deep space. It's sort of do it yourself.

I looked at how it works. They mail you a kit, so it's kind of like the you know, the DNA testing kits or something, but they mail you a kit with a space grade anatized aluminum alloy receptacle, and then you spoon some of the ashes into the receptacle with a complementary scoop, and then you send it back and they take care of the rest according to their launch schedule on their website. There are a couple of these Shooting Star package launches lined up for late I don't

know anymore. We'll we'll see if that happens, or see how that goes. But this is actually not the only company in the space burial game. People like Timothy Leary and Gene Roddenberry have already had their remains shot out into space. The previous big player in this game was a company called Celestis, and I think they're still around as far as I can tell, still doing what they do, and they offer packages that from what I could tell, we're a little bit more expensive than the ones by

Elysium Space. Well, both are pretty expensive, but but at least with the Elysium Space in the picture, it looks like the market is continuing to diversify. I don't know if this will become big business. I it's hard to tell. Yeah, yeah, to what extent to people really get behind this idea that I mean, it's it's so out of keeping with

the natural process that we've talked about. I mean, and it's also just cremation plus, but it's it's like cremation plus, we're gonna also always some fuel on sending this up into orbit or to the moon. Um Whereas, at least for me, I I find the idea of recycling the soil far more attractive. But but that's just me, and

some people want the more cosmic modeling. Well, I can see how the I can see the appeal of the cosmic model, even though I'm not a person who's ever, at least so far in my life, been all that particular about what happens to my body after I die, as long as it's not something that's grossly environmentally unsound or or involving traditional embalming. And yeah, I mean I'm kind of the same. Ultimately, the barrel barrel is about the survivors, you know, so it's it's kind of up

to down and what's going to make them happy. But I can see the appeal of the space launch as it kind of plays on the Williams Sapphire contingency speech for the loss of the Apollo eleven crew. Have you ever read this? I believe I have, but it's been a while. It's very strangely moving, it's very short, and it's also hard to imagine Richard Nixon reading this then. But supposedly if the crew members of the Apollo eleven. We're not going to be able to make it back

from the moon. This was the speech that was going to be read, and it talks about, you know, a piece of humankind being coming part of the stars for forever um and it's very moving. I mean, that's the thing, right, any of these the funeral practice we've discussed so far, it's it's like fift what you're actually doing with the body and uh sales pitch right, fifty percent presentation cosmology, you know, it's it's it's how do you describe what's happening?

Because on one hand, you could say, oh, well, they threw a dead body on top of a tower and a bunch of vultures ripped it apart. Or you can say the body was was unclean and these uh, these holy creatures came and dismantled it and made it pure again. You know, it's all about how you sell it right. Well, no matter what, it's gonna involve death and decomposition, Yeah, there's still getting around that. Well, I mean, essentially there's no getting around the fact that the body will be

broken down or preserved forever in some way. That's also not all that squeaky and clean. Well, I mean, eventually we get the heat death of the universe, so something's gonna happen. Now, I'd be remiss if we didn't mention cryo preservation. Uh, this is a This is of course the topic onto its own I think. I think there's an older episode of Stuff to Blow your mind, maybe even stuff in the Science Lab that goes into this, and it's probably a topic that we could revisit on

its own episode in the future. And of course this is the practice where we have a legally dead body that is then frozen. Uh. And then sometimes it's just neuro preservation, so it's just a head, a frozen head that's preserved. With the idea here being that you're kind of gambling on the possibility that at some point in the future will have the technology to take a frozen legally dead body or a frozen head and bring it back to life or resurrected in some way, um heal

the problems that are inherent in the body. Imagine it will probably be future Alma style. Yeah, future the future AUMA model is definitely one I keep coming back to. And you know, and it also there are a lot of factors here, like was was the body frozen in a way that doesn't destroy tissue? Is it cared for and maintained during this period? These are all pitfalls that

the sort of litter the history of cryopreservation. Uh. Thus far and uh and you know it's it's again it's a gamble is will these bodies be brought back to life? Will these heads be brought back life? Maybe not? Uh. It's ultimately not that different from the Egyptian bottle of mummification, right where it's all about preparing the body for a journey into a distant world in a distant age. Yeah, it's stalking the body up with everything it's about to

needy and uh and and it's an expensive model. All right. So we've discussed the old ways, we've discussed some of the current ways out there, even if some of them are a little bit futuristic. But now let's talk about where we're going. Yeah, So one of the big solutions to all these problems we've been talking about is what's sometimes just called natural burial, just straight up natural burial

or green burial. Uh. And in recent years you've seen a revival of these types of practices This is burial of bodies without all the concrete, steel, the carved tropical wood, the formale hyde. The philosophy is one of let nature take its course, sort of like the sky burial model, except it typically does involve interment in the ground. But there seemed to be a lot of benefits of this.

So it's getting rid of all these poisonous embalming fluids and and unnatural metal and concrete substances in the body. And it has come along with what are sometimes referred to as green cemeteries, which are places that encourage the green burial practice and and help you make it take place in at least one a r P pole. More than seventy percent of people who were asked about this UH picked green burial as the most appealing option for their burial, Which is kind of weird because you feel

like practices haven't really caught up with what people want. Yeah, because there are a number of I mean, just you're dealing with with varying like local regulations and even more overarching regulations UH surrounding the burial of the dead that are based on the embalming model. Right. Yeah, As you mentioned before, a lot of times when a loved one has died. People aren't aware of what their options really are. Do I have to have a concrete burial vault? Do

I have to get it in embalmed? You know? Does this sealed metal coffin have to explode? And in some places there there might be, like you said, laws are regulations that say, no, this is where and how you can bury. You're dead, and this is what you have to do. In other cases there might just be cemeteries that privately enforce their own policies. And you know, that might be like, you can't be buried in our cemetery

unless you have a concrete vault or something. But green cemeteries can help make those natural options clear and available to the consumer. And so typically this is just going to be plane burial in a kind of shroud or a biodegradable casket that's you know, cardboard or would or something like that, or even just a blanket. Now, tell

me about the pet cemetery with an as option. Well, there you find a place for the ground wind sour possibly due to wind to go infestations, and then you bury naturally the green burial the old way though disclaimers sometimes dead is better Okay, well that's that's definitely an option for for the Stephen King fans out there, of

whom I am one. Um. Now, if you want to a different model, and a model that kind of comes back to our early example of the the Irish soldier pulled up by the tree, you can just straight up become a tree. Kind of an extension of the green burial that we've already discussed, an extension of natural burial

that is a little more rigorously designed. And in this we were looking at a project that comes that came from Italian designers Anna Satelli and Raoul Bretzel, and this is called Capsula Mundy or World Pods um And and this is really elegant. I really like it. It's still kind of in the design phase. They're saying that instead of a cemetery, let's have sacred forests. And you create these these sacred forests by planting a tree atop the

burial of a special egg shaped corn starch pod. So it's like a corn starch pod that contains the dead body curled up in a fetal position, and then you just let nature take its course down there. It breaks down and then the nutrients from that dead body feed the tree that takes life above it. That sounds beautiful. Yeah, I think it would be great to become a tree.

I think so too. I I've I've thought about this before and often wonder though then that you then put increased um demands on the care of that tree, Like, then what happens if that tree dies? Because we've all I don't know if we all, but some of us have planted trees in our backyard before and uh and watch them die, And that would be extra disheartening if this was you know, uncle Uncle Clark's tree. Now Uncle Clark became this horrible dead tree that or he became

one of the talking trees from the Wizard of Oz. Yeah, so I feel like I wonder if there's not some room for dangerous personification of the tree in these in these examples, as elegant and beautiful as the example is. Oh, but just think what kinds of great Halloween lore this would create. You know, the forest where all the trees grew out of a corpse. I mean, what a what

a wonderful setting for the ghost lore of the future. Yeah, I mean, I you know there are cemeteries out there that of course you'll find plenty that are finally manicured and and mode, and then people bring in flowers. But you'll still find other cemeteries where they allow the weeds and the wild flowers to grow up all around them. And I think that they'll tend to find those to be very very peaceful places. You know. I like the vibe, so ultimately I like the the idea of the body

breaking down and becoming nature again. Okay, So so that's the natural green way, either just natural burial or maybe burial in a pod that becomes a tree or something like that. We could also look at the sort of the lab model, yes, for the green disposal. And one of the ideas that I came across here, which I just thought was amazing, is called promission. What is this, Robert Well, This comes to us from the Swedish company pro Mesha organic a b founded by Suzanne wig Massak.

And this is how it breaks down. First of all, the corpse is frozen too negative eighteen degrees celsius or zero degrees fahrenheit, and then submerged in liquid nitrogen. All right. Then the frozen, brittle corpse is gently bombarded with sound waves which break it down into a fine white powder. And I've also read that an adapted muscle stimulation machine is used for this, so I imagine we're talking an

ultrasonic stimulator. Uh. Still, I think that the van damn time coop kick or a grenade launcher should still be an option for the shattering of your corps. Or you could also do the sub zero yes, yes, a good

like ninja backhand, backfist kind of thing. Alright. So, um, then you have this powder, and the powder is sent through a vacuum chain or that evaporates all the water because the water belongs to the tribe, as we discussed in our our down episodes, and then the water, and since water is seventy of the body, I mean, it makes sense to remove that, uh and return it to the tribe. Then this powder, this pure powder um is taken and you pick any metal objects out of it,

like fillings or whatnot, and dispose of those properly. But then you're just left with this straight up corpse powder devoid of water. It's easier to break break that down in the soil than a corpse, so you just spread it, bury it however you want to deal with it. It's like perfect the perfect ashes of a body without having to actually burn it up and engage in that fuel loss. That's great. So freeze you, shatter you, scatter you in

a shallow grave, and that sounds kind of beautiful. There's another one that is maybe less beautiful but very cool, called resummation or resummation. It's sort of a trade name, I think for alkaline hydrolysis. Yeah, this is a it's

often termed in a biocremation. So what you're doing is you're using heated water and potassium hydroxide for LIE to liquefy the body and leave only bones behind, and then you take then the Once you have the bones, then hey, you kind of follow the straight up sky burial model and you just pulverize those and then you return the

bone fragments to the family. Yeah, so the body goes into this giant steel vessel with water and LIE gets heated up very hot to run three hundred or three hundred fifty degrees fahrenheit under high pressure, so essentially a live filled pressure cooker. And you get left there for a few hours and then you melt and then it's onto the crimulator. With the crimulator that's a real word. It's the machine that grinds down the bones to create

the powder that you get to take home. I think the crimulator could be the next great um wrestling gimmick if there any pro wrestlers out there. If you need a gimmick, go with the Crimulator. I like it. But this is cited as a greener alternative to burial and cremation because it produces far fewer carbon emissions than cremation and it uses less energy. So if you like the environment and you like melt movies, maybe you should see

about having yourself melted. Though it's not necessarily available everywhere, people in the United States apparently have not always been really keen on the idea of liquid cremation. It is legal in some states in the U s according to at least one website I found. It's legal in Georgia, but not according to another one, so I'm not quite

sure what the laways on that. In two thousand eleven, a funeral director named Jeff Edwards liquefied nineteen bodies through alkaline hydrolysis in Ohio before the state officials effectively shut him down by denying him burial permits, claiming that the practice was not in alignment with state regulations. Uh. Edwards had been referring to the practice practice by the name aquamation.

I'm not sure what that means. Yeah, you need a different term than just horpse liquefication, because that just sounds a bit too um you know, robot apocalypse. I guess yeah, I guess so. Anyway, apparently Catholic organizations have or some at least have been fighting the legality of this in Ohio. According to one, the idea of dissolving the body is not showing proper respect to the body in this we

we see this again and again throughout history. In Mary Roach's book Stiff, she mentions at one point this idea that what we could take bodies and use them for fuel, and that was that was just completely shouted down. Is disrespectful. But ultimately, we're talking about the processing of a dead body, and and sometimes that means just approaching it in a very scientific and um, you know, less emotional way. And uh.

And when we do that, there's inevitably going to be someone or a group of people, whole organizations that say, WHOA, slow down here, you're not processing our corpse, we're bearing them we are. We are we're allowing their passage into the after like we're approaching this with with decorum. Well yeah, a scientific or clinical approach to the disposal of a corpse is often viewed as somehow vaguely sociopathic, like, you know, you're not showing proper respect to the person. I don't

think that's necessarily the case. I mean, you might just not feel that the body represents what the person is. But one example of this is that there was legislation in New York State that was supposed to make alkaline hydrolysis legal there, and it was apparently referred to by detractors as the Hannibal Lecter's Bill, apparently a play on the name of Senator Kimp Hannon, who sponsored the bill.

That's it seems unfair, Yeah, because I think in any of these cases, yes, there's a model of it where someone could just very coldly dismantle or process a body. But in the same way someone could very coldly embalm a body. You know, it's just there are ways to carry out these procedures that that honored the day. Yeah. Well, I mean, alkaline hydrolysis has already been used to get rid of animal bodies and medical cadavers at the Mayo Clinic. Yeah, so why not as a as a standard option for

the disposal of the dead. All right, And that brings us to what Joe the mushroom death Suit. Yes, kind of a superstar of the Internet over the past a couple of years. I guess, uh because I remember seeing like when the initial stories came out about the TED Talk, and then eventually the TED Talk came out as well. Yeah, it's a few years old now, so officially it's going to be called the Infinity burial Suit. But come on, you know, let's dispense with the sanitized language. It's a

mushroom death suit. So the artist and inventor Jay Rim Lee gave a TED talk in July two thousand eleven to introduce this concept of what she called the Infinity Mushroom and the suit that helps the Infinity mushroom eat you. So, the Infinity Mushroom is the idea of a strain of mushroom that's trained to rapidly consume dead human flesh, and Lee claims that she herself has been training Petrie dishes of mycological tissue culture, which is fungus to eat her hair,

her fingernails, or dead skin cells. Uh. And this is a specific instance of the concept of decompic culture, which is an idea originating with the entomologist Timothy Miles, in which we essentially grow and cultivate our own decomposers the same way we grow and cultivate our own food crops or our draft animals. And the suit is simply an organic cotton suit. It looks kind of like black pajamas with white veins spreading across the outside of the body.

It looks vaguely futuristic, kind of Starfleet. Yeah. Apparently the white veins were said to represent the mycelium, the sort of roots that the mushrooms put out. And this suit has fungal spores embedded. And I believe the idea is that once the perfect strain of fungus has been created for the purpose of eating you, it's spores will be embedded in the suit, and then your body goes in

the suit and then they chow down. According to a two thousand eleven interview with New Scientists, she mentioned that the suit as it was might not be friendly enough to the mushroom spores and talked about you know the possibility that she might have to coax the spores to continue eating with a second skin of gelatin inside the suit. I find the aesthetics of this idea oddly compelling. But if this thing ever were made widely available, I wonder

how many people would actually buy it and use it. Well, this could be an aspect of the project. There's more art and science, right, because ultimately the mushroom death suit is less about her saying, hey, this is this thing we should all wear, and more about presenting uh, an extreme but aesthetically pleasing model of the kinds of burial practices we could be moving towards. It's kind of like

high fashion, right Nobody. No, nobody looks at that futuristic, crazy like square dress on a catwalk and says, oh, I'm going to wear that, And the fashion designer probably doesn't think that either. But it's about presenting this, uh, this extreme idea that will then pull us in its direction. Yeah,

I can see that. How It's sort of a it's the concept that filters down rather than the exact explicit design, And the concept really isn't all that different from the idea of sky burial, Whereas with sky burial, You're you're talking more about direct access to larger animal scavenging birds. This is providing access to smaller decomposers, the fungus, the tiny microscopic things that will still eat us the same

way the vultures will. I think the problem here is that um in the sky burial model, the carrying birds have have an elevated status, and there there's a there's a magic to them, and we need to We need more magic with our mushrooms. We need mushroom gods. We need to worship the mushroom. Yes, we need we need some troom bay maybe love crafty and deities that we have to deal with, some sort of Nego goddess, or

perhaps the mushroom goddess of dungeons and dragons. I can't remember her name off hand, but I know she's in the back of the campaign book that I just picked up. Yeah. Well, one's always tempted to think that the machine elves are

in fact mushrooms of some kind. In reaction to this mushroom thing, I thought some of the comments sections on these articles were sort of weird because people seem surprisingly gung ho about it, or conversely reacting negatively with what seemed to me patently irrational reasoning, with people seeming to think things like the fungal composition would be painful. Well, it comes back to like the the irresistible urge to

humanize the dead body. You know, we're talking about the caskets and about like sealing it off and that being a huge aspect of it. But then it's ultimately like I feel like, I feel like Grandpa would like a comfy pillow. I feel like Grandpa would be more comfortable. I would be more comfortable if we just aligned the whole thing with pillows. Yeah, ry are their cushions inside of coffin? Yeah? And then it just gets just spirals

out of control from there. So yeah, we can't help but look at the body and think, I don't want something painful to happen to that body if that can no longer feel pain and it's no longer a person, but we do it anyway, just human nature. I guess it is all right. So there you have it. Burial some old options, some current options, some futuristic near future options for your consideration. Uh. In the meantime, checkout stuff to Blow your mind dot com. That's where we find

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