Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and up Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and right at the top of this episode, we want
Speaker 1: to just hit three quick things. First of all, Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot Com. That's our mothership. That's
Speaker 1: where you'll find all the podcast episodes, blog post videos,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And you know it's currently for the month
Speaker 1: of October. We're gonna have it front loaded with a
Speaker 1: lot of cool Halloween content. And along those those lines,
Speaker 1: we have a new season of Monster Science coming out,
Speaker 1: four new episodes looking at the connections between fictional monsters
Speaker 1: and real world science. So there's one about werewolves, there's
Speaker 1: one about Big Trouble Little China. Hopefully a lot of
Speaker 1: great stuff in there. I think you'll all enjoy it.
Speaker 1: And hold on, you gotta tell me what's the science
Speaker 1: of David Lopan. Oh well, it's not so much David
Speaker 1: Lopan as one of his minions. Okay, very explosive minion um.
Speaker 1: Just to give you a hint. Uh So, yeah, Dr
Speaker 1: Anton Jessup will look into that and and draw some
Speaker 1: interesting comparisons between that and something in the natural world.
Speaker 1: And finally periscoping, Uh, stuff to blow your mind me,
Speaker 1: Joe Christian, we will be on the periscope October twenty
Speaker 1: three attending to our build up of listener mail, which
Speaker 1: is his built up under the sands like a like
Speaker 1: a like a prespice mass just ready to blow to
Speaker 1: the surface. So again October twenty three on that stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind dot com. And now let's move
Speaker 1: on with today's episode. So it's October, our favorite month.
Speaker 1: It's my favorite month. I assume it's yours. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I often get into trouble by placing I think too
Speaker 1: much emphasis on it, Like I build it up all year,
Speaker 1: and then when it comes I kind of forget that. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's extra cool stuff and the weather is hopefully getting
Speaker 1: a little cooler. Uh, and there's Halloween. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, all the other stuff in life is still
Speaker 1: happening and uh and isn't gonna make it this just
Speaker 1: idyllic kind of scenario. In our house, we treat Halloween
Speaker 1: the way malls treat Christmas, where like the entire month
Speaker 1: leading up to it, it's Halloween every day, So we
Speaker 1: we watched monster movies all all October. It's it's our
Speaker 1: favorite part of the year. And so it being October,
Speaker 1: now we thought we'd talked about some corpses. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's part and partial to the holiday, right, Contemplations
Speaker 1: of death inform our our monsters are our traditions, and uh, you,
Speaker 1: you can't separate it from Halloween. So we might as
Speaker 1: well just get right down to the nitty gritty and
Speaker 1: talk about what what we do when it when a
Speaker 1: human being dies? What have we done in the past,
Speaker 1: what are we doing now, and what might we do
Speaker 1: in the future. Yeah, so our inspiration for this episode
Speaker 1: was I think it was two weeks ago, I don't know,
Speaker 1: a while ago. Robert and I were in here one
Speaker 1: morning looking for a cool story to talk about, and
Speaker 1: my wife Rachel had sent me this worry about a
Speaker 1: tree in Ireland that got blown over in a storm
Speaker 1: and as it was blown over in the storm, it
Speaker 1: pulled up a large clod of topsoil with its roots,
Speaker 1: and hanging there in the roots was half of a
Speaker 1: human skeleton, and the other half was still left in
Speaker 1: the ground below the tree. But a tree had grown
Speaker 1: up out of this dead body that had supposedly been
Speaker 1: somebody probably murdered in the Middle Ages, and that the case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he you know, he was probably killed either in combat
Speaker 1: or some sort of you know, bloodthirsty Irish duel, who knows.
Speaker 1: But then you buried in a shallow grave, and over
Speaker 1: time a tree grows there or adjacent to it, and
Speaker 1: when that tree falls over rips up a portion of
Speaker 1: his skeleton remains. Yeah, so what began is grizzly into
Speaker 1: kind of oddly beautiful with the tree coming up out
Speaker 1: of the ground. And and we found out while looking
Speaker 1: a bit further into the story in this topic of
Speaker 1: trees growing out of human corpses, that some people are
Speaker 1: actually seeking this on purpose. And so that got us
Speaker 1: thinking about the whole idea of of new ways of
Speaker 1: dealing with our dead. Yeah. I mean, there are lots
Speaker 1: of weird things you could do with the dead body.
Speaker 1: I mean, you might just take a corpse and put
Speaker 1: it in a rocking chair on your front board, let
Speaker 1: it scare the trick or treaters, or you might throw
Speaker 1: it into a volcano, or I don't know, what are
Speaker 1: some other good things to do. Well. I always like
Speaker 1: the danger diabolic model, where you just where you're just
Speaker 1: sealed in gold, right, just alive, just mummified as a
Speaker 1: golden statue. Oh that's a really good one. So it's
Speaker 1: like the inverse of the person who gets molten gold
Speaker 1: poured down his throat. Yes, yeah, yeah, And you know
Speaker 1: it ties in, of course, our need with a lot
Speaker 1: of burial practices, to to make something offous that will
Speaker 1: stand the test of time. We have died, our name
Speaker 1: is going to die. But hey, show me the solid
Speaker 1: gold statue of me. Nobody's gonna come around and claim
Speaker 1: that and reuse that those materials, right, I mean, wouldn't
Speaker 1: that be ironic if the Great Memorial to the to
Speaker 1: the Dead Beloved Leader ends up in the electronics of
Speaker 1: the future there go, I was just thinking about that.
Speaker 1: I end up getting broken down again, and then my
Speaker 1: gold is used in various little wearable gadgets, so I
Speaker 1: gotta make a catalytic converter, come on. But yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: So one of the things that we found is interesting
Speaker 1: looking into this is how much some of the new
Speaker 1: and exciting ways of disposing of our dead actually mimic
Speaker 1: some of the oldest ways that we're sort of coming
Speaker 1: full circle, and so I think we should start by
Speaker 1: looking at some ancient practices for disposal of the dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, just thinking, like the most
Speaker 1: basic scenario possible, just some primordial human wandering around out
Speaker 1: in the waist waste plans, you know, dressed in furs,
Speaker 1: he or she keels over dead. What happens. Nature takes
Speaker 1: its course, decomposition, insects moving in, laying their eggs, sat scavenging,
Speaker 1: animals coming in, tearing it apart, the Sun, the elements,
Speaker 1: all of it working to just erase that body from
Speaker 1: the face of the Earth, like all signs of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's one of those, uh, the situations when
Speaker 1: you look at the fossil record, Like, one of the
Speaker 1: reasons that the fossil record is inherently incomplete is because
Speaker 1: you have to have a certain set of conditions met
Speaker 1: for the skeletal remains of an ancient beast to fossilize
Speaker 1: and therefore stand the test of time um and potentially
Speaker 1: wind up being discovered by explorers or paleontologists. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: most terrestrial animals do not die under conditions that are
Speaker 1: conducive for fossilization. Yeah. They come from nothing and they
Speaker 1: return to nothing. And it just is all part of
Speaker 1: the the recycling UM. And so we see some some
Speaker 1: of our our older models of dealing with the dead,
Speaker 1: you see them UH working in synergy with this, with
Speaker 1: this kind of recycling of the body UM. One of
Speaker 1: my favorites, of course is his sky burial or celestial
Speaker 1: burial UM, which is a form of exposure burial or excarnation,
Speaker 1: if you will. The most famous example of this UH
Speaker 1: is probably the Tibetan model, which is called tour or
Speaker 1: the giving of alms to the birds. So and this
Speaker 1: is this is when you have the body of a
Speaker 1: deceased individual and it's um essentially dismantled, taken apart by
Speaker 1: a chosen individual so that it can be quickly consumed
Speaker 1: by the vultures. And there are a number of scenarios
Speaker 1: that play into into this. Okay, for starters, just the
Speaker 1: Tibetan environment. The ground is um is rocky or it's frozen.
Speaker 1: It's so available soil as at a premium. So any
Speaker 1: any available soil in the Tibetan landscape, you're you're probably
Speaker 1: using it to produce food. You can't waste a lot
Speaker 1: of it on on burial grounds. And imagine you're farming
Speaker 1: or grazing your animals on it right now. Meanwhile, you
Speaker 1: have natural scavengers in the era you have you have
Speaker 1: some wolves, you have carrying hungry uh um lamba guyers
Speaker 1: and vultures that are unting the air overhead. We'll hold on.
Speaker 1: What's a lambur guy Oh, lambur guyer is wonderful um
Speaker 1: scavenging bird that depends on on the bones and I'll
Speaker 1: take the bones up to a high height, drop them,
Speaker 1: let the drones that the bones crack open, and then
Speaker 1: go down and uh and have at them. So that's genius. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's banned and perhaps serves as some of
Speaker 1: the inspiration for the practice of sky burials about about
Speaker 1: to relate here. The other aspect is that the while
Speaker 1: we tend to associate the bat today, you know, very
Speaker 1: strongly with Tibetan Buddhism, but the region's earlier bond religion
Speaker 1: was animistic and viewed non humans as spiritual beings. So
Speaker 1: in this case, you would have you know, it's not
Speaker 1: just a scavenging bird, it's a it's a holy animal, right,
Speaker 1: and so it's it's all the more appropriate that it
Speaker 1: consumed the dead. That kind of practice seems to me
Speaker 1: like it's especially acceptable to people if you view the
Speaker 1: animals that are scavenging as holy in some way, because
Speaker 1: we don't really tend to look at vultures that way.
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should, but but we think of
Speaker 1: vultures is kind of like nasty creatures, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like sewer rats or something. But if you look at
Speaker 1: a vulture as a as a noble beast, having to
Speaker 1: consume your flesh seems like a cool thing. And yeah,
Speaker 1: even if there's some defensive vomiting involved, Yeah, we spent
Speaker 1: our whole lives wanting to to fly, and hey, here's
Speaker 1: your chance in the belly of the vulture. Um. But
Speaker 1: so that the approach here is kind of like that
Speaker 1: of the dismantling that I mentioned with the lambur guyer. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have a period of mourning and prayer. Then the
Speaker 1: body is blessed, it's cleaned, it wrapped in white cloth,
Speaker 1: and finally the spine is broken and this allows the
Speaker 1: body to be folded into a smaller bundle, and then
Speaker 1: it's carried to a sacred burial site on the back
Speaker 1: of a close friend or a family member. And then
Speaker 1: the actual sky burial itself falls to either a rogyapa
Speaker 1: whose work is uh, it's more straightforward rendering of the corpse,
Speaker 1: or a lama burial master who has a monk, recites prayers,
Speaker 1: doing the ritual in addition to breaking the body. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about taking the body, putting it face down
Speaker 1: on the stones. Um. So it's not literal burial, no, No,
Speaker 1: it's it's more like I am bearing you well in
Speaker 1: the sky, in the vulture, in the birds and the
Speaker 1: scavengers that will take off. But there's there's some aid
Speaker 1: applied here. So talking about using a flaming knife for axe,
Speaker 1: cutting off the hair, then slicing up the body, eviscerating it,
Speaker 1: chopping off the limbs. Uh, just a ritual dismantling of
Speaker 1: the body. Um, to allow easier consumption by the birds.
Speaker 1: So you just don't have a bunch of dead bodies
Speaker 1: lingering about and then um, I mean they'll even go
Speaker 1: so far as to pulverize the remaining bones with a hammer,
Speaker 1: then mixing them with like a barley flower so that
Speaker 1: the birds can easily consume that as well, basically doing
Speaker 1: the lamberguier's job for Yeah, but it's but it's beautiful
Speaker 1: and it's its way, you know, because I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's very different from especially the modern Western idea of
Speaker 1: of bearing the body and this little tomb and embalming it,
Speaker 1: which we're gonna get into all that shortly. Um, but
Speaker 1: it's more in keeping with that the basic reality of death. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's not only more in keeping with the natural
Speaker 1: process of decomposition, but it's actively encouraging it. It's going
Speaker 1: in the opposite direction of embalming. So if you look
Speaker 1: at modern Western burial practices with caskets and involving as
Speaker 1: essentially trying to prevent the onset of decomposition or put
Speaker 1: up a big halt sign for nature, this is not
Speaker 1: only allowing nature to take its course, but it's trying
Speaker 1: to hasten nature's access to the body. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's saying, let's speed this up a bit. Because of
Speaker 1: the human bodies are fairly large body, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: compared to a lot of creatures out there, So it
Speaker 1: does their fauna. Yeah, we are and uh and there
Speaker 1: are a lot of us and be if you have
Speaker 1: a region that's engaging in this kind of sky burial,
Speaker 1: you know, it would be easy for the bodies to
Speaker 1: build up at these sacred sites. Now, another famous model
Speaker 1: of exposure burial is uh the Zoroastrian model, uh, the
Speaker 1: scoff Sky burial via a Tower of Silence. This is
Speaker 1: so interesting and cool and also the Tower of Silence
Speaker 1: has always sounded to me like the name of a
Speaker 1: great strategy game that doesn't exist, Like you should have
Speaker 1: Chess and Go and Tower of Silence. I was thinking
Speaker 1: like a Dungeons and Dragons module, Like we're gonna play
Speaker 1: the Tower of Silence is a classic campaign uh adventure here,
Speaker 1: you know, just because it sounds like a place you
Speaker 1: would go and encounter a wizard but gelatinous cube. But
Speaker 1: but the Tower of Sunds. You actually still find these
Speaker 1: in modern day Iran. Uh. This form of exposure burial
Speaker 1: is still practiced up in parts of India. And the
Speaker 1: model for this Tower of Silence basically you have a
Speaker 1: this cylindrical tower looks like a big stone drum um
Speaker 1: and on top of the the roof slopes slightly in towards
Speaker 1: the center, you know, and keep things from falling off
Speaker 1: because that's where you arrange the bodies of the dead
Speaker 1: in three concentric rings from men, women, and at the
Speaker 1: innermost region the children. And uh, basically you just let
Speaker 1: the sun, insects and scavenging birds do their work stripping
Speaker 1: the unclean body. And that's key here because in the
Speaker 1: Zoroastrian worldview, the dead body is just an inherently unclean thing.
Speaker 1: That is um that not only is it susceptible. I mean,
Speaker 1: in reality, of course, their diseases associated with the dead body,
Speaker 1: but within this uh, this magical worldview that also you
Speaker 1: could have an evil spirit enter into the body. The
Speaker 1: the just nastiness of the body could could not only
Speaker 1: make its surroundings physically unclean, but spiritually unclean. So like this,
Speaker 1: they just want the natural elements to take care of
Speaker 1: that blight as soon as possible. So they just let
Speaker 1: the scaven to do their work, and then the remaining
Speaker 1: bones are taken and stored in an assilary. I love
Speaker 1: the idea here that nature is a sort of cleansing
Speaker 1: agent too. Yeah, so it's not just allowing nature to
Speaker 1: do its work, but it's allowing nature to do something
Speaker 1: useful for you, you know, to to not only get
Speaker 1: rid of this uh, this stinking and uh and potentially
Speaker 1: disease causing mass of flesh, but to potentially remove spiritual danger. Yes, totally. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, in the ancient world, we don't want to
Speaker 1: say that it was all natural and stuff, because some
Speaker 1: people in the ancient world had very similar ideas to
Speaker 1: the modern embalming mentality. Yeah, I mean the obvious example
Speaker 1: here is Egyptian mommification, which Christian and I just did
Speaker 1: a big episode about. I think by the kind of
Speaker 1: airs it will be like the episode before it. Uh
Speaker 1: So go back and listen to that if if you're interested.
Speaker 1: But even that model, even this model that eventually evolves
Speaker 1: to the point where elaborate means are being taken to
Speaker 1: ensure that the body remains in kind of like a
Speaker 1: lifelike state for all eternity. It's its origin still lie
Speaker 1: in the natural process of decomposition or the natural mummification
Speaker 1: of this in this case of the body, because the
Speaker 1: earliest models of Egyptian burial that you find there's there's
Speaker 1: no casket, there's no housing, it's just a few belongings
Speaker 1: and a dead body buried in the sand and in
Speaker 1: the dry sand. This is where you end up with
Speaker 1: these really the incidental uh preservation of internal organs, the
Speaker 1: crisping of the skin, um the natural mummification of the body.
Speaker 1: And then it's only as their funeral practices evolved they
Speaker 1: so they start throwing in caskets and other enclosures, and
Speaker 1: then they're interfering with the natural process that had just
Speaker 1: been a part of living and dying in that environment.
Speaker 1: Then they return to mummification as a means to to
Speaker 1: reclaim what was happening naturally. Yeah, that's interesting. I've never
Speaker 1: thought about it that way. But we could think about
Speaker 1: decomposition not as a feature of the animal that has died,
Speaker 1: but as a feature of the environment that it dies in,
Speaker 1: or at least wherever its body is stored. I mean,
Speaker 1: I suppose you could take a body from one environment
Speaker 1: to another. But yeah, if you are in ancient Egypt
Speaker 1: or at least a very dry, sandy desert, part of it,
Speaker 1: mummification is almost a natural process. Yeah. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's really like the the mummification as we think about
Speaker 1: the unnatural mummification, the the funeral mummification, it simply means
Speaker 1: to reclaim the natural process. Yeah. And then of course
Speaker 1: we've got cremation, right. This is something that's popular now
Speaker 1: in the modern world, and it has existed for a
Speaker 1: long time, though it's in different cultures, come in and
Speaker 1: out of fashion over the millennia. Cremation just means, of course,
Speaker 1: burning the body into ashes, and it's existed for thousands
Speaker 1: of yours as a funerary practice. We find evidence of
Speaker 1: it going back to the Stone Age. Just one example
Speaker 1: of very ancient cremation. And is this skeletal remains found
Speaker 1: in Australia known as Lake Mungo One or the Lake
Speaker 1: Mongo Lady, discovered in nineteen sixty nine by Australian archaeologists.
Speaker 1: Have you heard about this? It's very interesting, So more
Speaker 1: than twenty thousand years ago. And I phrase it that
Speaker 1: way because I've seen wildly conflicting dates on this could
Speaker 1: be around twenty thousand years ago, forty thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: we're up to sixty thousand years ago, and I think, uh,
Speaker 1: this seems to reflect a debate about the dating of
Speaker 1: these remains. But I think the most agreed upon date
Speaker 1: now is about forty thousand years ago. I could be
Speaker 1: wrong about that anyway. At that time there was a
Speaker 1: civilization living near Lake Mungo in Australia, and and the
Speaker 1: Mongo lady was one of these people. Evidence shows that
Speaker 1: her body was cremated, but not just cremated, It was
Speaker 1: burned and then the leftover bones were crushed and then
Speaker 1: burned again before being buried. And this definitely, to me
Speaker 1: indicates some kind of ritual. But what did it mean.
Speaker 1: I don't know if anybody has any good speculation about this,
Speaker 1: but it's fascinating to imagine what would cause this. I mean,
Speaker 1: can you imagine this being done out of respect for
Speaker 1: a dead loved one. It might have been some kind
Speaker 1: of ritual along those lines, or it could have been
Speaker 1: to prevent the returning from beyond the grave of a
Speaker 1: of a haunting or something like that. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: at heart, they're using the technology of fire to dispose
Speaker 1: of the dead, and maybe we can sort of compare
Speaker 1: that to the more modern approaches where it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is a technological, a modern cultured means of disposing
Speaker 1: of the dead, and therefore I can get behind it
Speaker 1: as opposed to just you know, wolves eating a dead
Speaker 1: loved one. And so you know that this is this
Speaker 1: is like the high tech means of the day, Like
Speaker 1: we're not this is not just going to be a burial.
Speaker 1: This is not going to be just left in the
Speaker 1: woods for animals. We're going to use our greatest technological achievement,
Speaker 1: our mastery of fire, to do nature's job for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think we should definitely not fall into the
Speaker 1: trap of thinking like, oh, what a bizarre funeral practice
Speaker 1: they had were more advanced now. I mean, look at
Speaker 1: all the strange stuff we do now. I mean, funeral
Speaker 1: practices change over time, and this is what they did
Speaker 1: for some reason. Yeah. I mean when I was talking
Speaker 1: about ancient Egyptian mummification with Christian were many times we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this sounds grotesque and weird to an outsider, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, across time and space. But is it really
Speaker 1: that different from what goes on inside a mortuary today
Speaker 1: with the involving of a corpse. Not really. I mean
Speaker 1: I can't imagine anything weirder and grosser than modern evolving
Speaker 1: But anyway, So more about cremation. Cremation was practiced in
Speaker 1: parts of Asia on and off throughout history. Hinduism has
Speaker 1: actually traditionally viewed cremation is the proper ritual for the
Speaker 1: body of a dead adult. So they had cremation ceremonies
Speaker 1: called antimas sanscar I apologize if I'm pronouncing that wrong,
Speaker 1: or the anti s d and those are sort of
Speaker 1: meaning the last rites or the last sacrifice. And this
Speaker 1: is one of the sixteen life rituals of Hinduism. So
Speaker 1: it was believed that when you performed cremation on a
Speaker 1: dead adult Hindu that it sort of ushered the soul
Speaker 1: into the next life. Yeah. And that's, of course and
Speaker 1: an important fact to keep in mind when looking at
Speaker 1: any funeral model, particularly in uh In, when Hinduism and
Speaker 1: Buddhism is the essential journey into the next phase of existence. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I also found several sources saying there's evidence of
Speaker 1: ancient cremation practice in China going back to eight thousand
Speaker 1: b C. And that cremation seems to have often been
Speaker 1: an accepted practice in Buddhist societies. In Western civilization, it's
Speaker 1: a little different. So the pagan Skandinavians were all about
Speaker 1: burning their dead. They loved some cremation until those societies
Speaker 1: largely converted to Christianity in the later Roman period and
Speaker 1: then the Middle Ages. Because then you're having this idea
Speaker 1: of not only resurrection but a physical resurrection of the dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Christian and Jewish theology has differed on this, and
Speaker 1: I'll say something about that in a minute. We can
Speaker 1: see examples of cremation in Greek literature, like if you
Speaker 1: look back at the Iliad, So it's a ritual cremation
Speaker 1: as an honor extended to heroes and great leaders. And
Speaker 1: this may have actually emerged as a response to necessity
Speaker 1: for cremation in wartime conditions. So imagine you're having a
Speaker 1: big battle with somebody you know, on on alien soil
Speaker 1: and a great Greek hero falls on the battlefield, and
Speaker 1: the war is still going on, and you want to
Speaker 1: you want to honor the hero, but you can't take
Speaker 1: him home at the moment, and you don't want to
Speaker 1: bury him on foreign soil, So you have a funeral
Speaker 1: of flames, and then you carry the ashes back after
Speaker 1: the war is over, the ashes or the bones or
Speaker 1: something like that. And this may have caused cremation to
Speaker 1: be associated with a the valorous elite of society, and
Speaker 1: the same thing seems to have happened in ancient Romes.
Speaker 1: A ritual cremation was seen as this honorable, prestigious thing
Speaker 1: to do with the body, and thus it became very popular. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean you're talking, we're talking about skybarrow earlier, right,
Speaker 1: and you are physically becoming one with the birds that
Speaker 1: ascend into heaven. Like here you get to ascend into
Speaker 1: heaven or at least up into the sky as a
Speaker 1: pillar of smoke. You know. It's it's it's beautiful and
Speaker 1: cosmic in its own way. Yeah, And of course with
Speaker 1: both the Greeks and the Romans, there are other stages
Speaker 1: to this ritual beyond just the burning, Like there are
Speaker 1: stories of uh, of the bones being collected after the
Speaker 1: burning and then maybe washed with something nice like oil
Speaker 1: or wine and then stored in some appropriately stately receptacle.
Speaker 1: But then after a while in the Western world, cremation
Speaker 1: started to go out of styles. So some theological strains
Speaker 1: of Christianity and Judaism have historically opposed cremation on religious
Speaker 1: or cultural grounds. Uh. This wasn't always necessarily the case,
Speaker 1: and many Christians and Jews are totally fine with cremation today.
Speaker 1: It just depends on which subset of theological beliefs you
Speaker 1: might have, And cremation remained pretty unpopular and uncommon in
Speaker 1: the West, except for you know, extenuating circumstances, like when
Speaker 1: you had a bunch of plague victims you had to
Speaker 1: get rid of or something. And it stayed that way
Speaker 1: until the late eighteen hundreds when some influential doctors in
Speaker 1: Britain and the United States started advocating cremation again and
Speaker 1: um it, though definitely with a different method than the
Speaker 1: traditional great Pagan funeral. This was more like what we
Speaker 1: see with modern cremation today, where the body is put
Speaker 1: into a heated chamber and then the tissues are reduced
Speaker 1: to ash and the bones are then ground into a
Speaker 1: fine powder, very high temperature technological burn, really close to
Speaker 1: just I mean, it's it's great to put a body
Speaker 1: on a on a boat and then shoot it with
Speaker 1: the flaming arrow, but to demand that level of archery
Speaker 1: skill on the part of the average that has been
Speaker 1: it is too much. It's embarrassing to miss, but it's
Speaker 1: hard to miss getting the body into the into the chamber.
Speaker 1: You just kind of roll it on in and then
Speaker 1: of course, in recent years cremation has been on the rise. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: And we're actually gonna run through some of the stats
Speaker 1: on that here in a second. But I guess to
Speaker 1: close out just sort of ancient models on top of
Speaker 1: what we mentioned. Yes, you saw burials in the ground,
Speaker 1: and and and really I think that is still in
Speaker 1: keeping with the idea of decomposition. Right. Let decomposition happen
Speaker 1: in the ground, but where I don't have to see it,
Speaker 1: and then let me I'll put a big stone over
Speaker 1: it because I don't want to see it, which means
Speaker 1: I don't want to see wolves running around with pieces
Speaker 1: of my loved ones, you know. And of course those
Speaker 1: burials were very diverse too, just like we'll be talking
Speaker 1: about the ones today. I think some were probably much
Speaker 1: more natural, where the body is wrapped in a shroud
Speaker 1: or cloth and then buried and allowed to decompose. Others
Speaker 1: had rock tombs and stuff like that. I think you
Speaker 1: can just get increasingly carried away as a culture, particularly
Speaker 1: if you begin to see more and more that individual
Speaker 1: is still a lit because it's a it's a tricky areas.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned in the modification episode, that person is
Speaker 1: not your loved one anymore. It's not a person anymore.
Speaker 1: It's a corpse, but it still looks like them. It's
Speaker 1: still them on a physical level. And you want to
Speaker 1: treat it with respect. Yeah, and to bring back Christianity
Speaker 1: and Judaism again. Sometimes this can be complicated by theological beliefs,
Speaker 1: because some people might have a belief that says the
Speaker 1: body is actually important for the afterlife, Like some forms
Speaker 1: of Judaism and Christianity will look at that body and say, well,
Speaker 1: that body is eventually going to be resurrected one day,
Speaker 1: and you need to keep the body intact for that event. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: in Hinduism and Buddhism, where you have the where you
Speaker 1: have the model of reincarnation, then that individual has just
Speaker 1: has moved on to a different form, to a different realm,
Speaker 1: and therefore the body is just worthless at this point. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's more of a spiritual afterlife and rebirth. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: what a funeral practices look like in in at least
Speaker 1: the United States today. Else, I imagine for a lot
Speaker 1: of our particularly US listeners, we probably don't have to
Speaker 1: tell you. You've probably seen it in your life, just
Speaker 1: at least what it, what it looks like, what the
Speaker 1: traditions consist of. But it's interesting, even if you've dealt
Speaker 1: with it in your life, how much you don't actually
Speaker 1: see Oh yeah, I mean, we are pretty far removed
Speaker 1: from the physical process of death these days too. I mean,
Speaker 1: to really do a staggering degree, and it ultimately makes
Speaker 1: I think death more shocking when it occurs. Um. But
Speaker 1: just just to put some of the numbers behind what's happening.
Speaker 1: According to the National Funeral Directors Association, UH funeral homes
Speaker 1: in the in the USA for two thousand fifteen, we
Speaker 1: have nineteen thousand, three hundred ninety one of them, and
Speaker 1: that's down from nineteen thousand, four hundred and eighty six
Speaker 1: just in two thousand fourteen, So we see a decline
Speaker 1: every year. UM, fewer of these of these funeral homes,
Speaker 1: and most of these funeral homes are family owned. I'm
Speaker 1: wondering how much the average funeral costs, because in a
Speaker 1: lot of my research for this episode, I saw some
Speaker 1: numbers that were very it seemed very high to meet.
Speaker 1: Some people were saying, oh, ten thousand dollars for a funeral.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I think that's probably the high end.
Speaker 1: According to to the National Funeral Directors Association, the medium
Speaker 1: cost of a of a funeral for two thousand twelve
Speaker 1: was seven thousand and forty five dollars um, and I've
Speaker 1: seen some more recent stats that push that up to
Speaker 1: around eight thousand for today. So um, you know, think
Speaker 1: of that. It's just a general sort of framework. You
Speaker 1: can probably go lower, you can definitely go higher, you know,
Speaker 1: especially you know you're dealing with prime burial real estate,
Speaker 1: if you're dealing with the most expensive model of cast
Speaker 1: get available, which might be the worst. And we'll get
Speaker 1: into that. But yeah, another thing is I think comparing
Speaker 1: burial versus cremation the primary means of disposal of body
Speaker 1: in the West today. Like I said, cremation started to
Speaker 1: come back on the scene in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: but it still wasn't very popular, is very slow to
Speaker 1: pick up, right, but it's really been picking up in
Speaker 1: recent years. So according to the stats from the National
Speaker 1: Funeral Directors Association in two thousand five, burial accounted for
Speaker 1: sixty one point four percent, cremation thirty two point three. Still,
Speaker 1: that's a hefty number of creat creat of cremations, right
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen. This year this is they're they're projecting
Speaker 1: the cremations actually UM tip the scale to forty eight
Speaker 1: point five percent versus forty five point six percent for burial.
Speaker 1: So we see cremation in ten years, cremation becoming UM
Speaker 1: slightly more popular, and they project that if this the
Speaker 1: rate continues, by twenty we'll see cremation accounting for seventy
Speaker 1: one percent versus twenty three point two percent for burial.
Speaker 1: So well, I can definitely think of one reason this
Speaker 1: might be emerging, which is lack of real estate. Right,
Speaker 1: That's that's definitely definitely one fact or. And I think
Speaker 1: you can also factor in just more diverse backgrounds for
Speaker 1: residents of the United States, either you know their actual
Speaker 1: cultural background or um you know various ideas about about
Speaker 1: about funeral rights that they have absorbed from other cultures. However,
Speaker 1: I do have to say that you know, we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about cremation in a bit
Speaker 1: and some of the problems with cremation, and I feel
Speaker 1: like that could play a role in undermining this projected
Speaker 1: UM rise continued rise of crematory practice. But back to
Speaker 1: your point about real estate UM. Indeed, a two thousand
Speaker 1: thirteen study from York University Semitary Cemetery Research Group suggested
Speaker 1: nearly half of the cemeteries in England could fill up
Speaker 1: entirely in the following two decades. So I know, I've
Speaker 1: seen Josh and Chuck do some video while back about
Speaker 1: cemetery real estate. I think it was in New York
Speaker 1: and how it's just so high end demand and so
Speaker 1: expensive it's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean it, simply put, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of us on the earth at any
Speaker 1: given point that are alive, and if you start counting
Speaker 1: our populations of the dead, that's an even more staggering number.
Speaker 1: You just can't continue to say, all right, this plot
Speaker 1: of ground belongs to this person for all eternity. You're
Speaker 1: limited ground. Yeah, you have to fall, you have to
Speaker 1: You have to go with different models, either the reuse
Speaker 1: of grave plots and then storing the ashes away. I've
Speaker 1: seen some really fascinating models out of Japan where you
Speaker 1: essentially have, you know, a mausoleum storing facility and you
Speaker 1: can go to a chamber and it will like a
Speaker 1: machine will bring the urn to you. So, um, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a combination between a mausoleum and some
Speaker 1: sort of uh, you know, um coin operated convenience machine.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of the millions of pods, like the scene
Speaker 1: in the May turps where he wakes up and yeah,
Speaker 1: hold one out and bring it to you. What's the
Speaker 1: most effective way to store this these remains and then
Speaker 1: facilitate visiting the remains and honoring the remains, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: serialized shelving. Now this brings us to embalming in a Again,
Speaker 1: I need to point out that embalming, of course, has
Speaker 1: been around for a long time, even though in some
Speaker 1: of the ancient Egyptian models of mummification involved varying degrees
Speaker 1: of embalming. Yeah, but if you think of embalming as
Speaker 1: the traditional Western way of of burial, you might actually
Speaker 1: be wrong. They're depending on what you mean by traditional,
Speaker 1: because actually the way we embalm corpses today, you know,
Speaker 1: most corpses in the United States, is not all that
Speaker 1: old of a practice, right. I've heard that it's more
Speaker 1: linked to the Civil War period. Indeed, Yeah, particularly to
Speaker 1: one individual, doctor Thomas Holmes, who introduced chemical embalming out
Speaker 1: on the battlefields during the Civil War, because obviously at
Speaker 1: the time you have a tremendous amount of Americans dying
Speaker 1: on American soil though typically you know, far from far
Speaker 1: from home. So in order to return that body to
Speaker 1: the family and return it in a way that it's
Speaker 1: still preserved enough for burial. And again keeping in mind
Speaker 1: uh Western Christian models um of of of of of
Speaker 1: resurrection and physical resurrection, you know, the importance for the
Speaker 1: body to remain intact in some way, shape or form, uh,
Speaker 1: in order to honor that and potentially make a little money.
Speaker 1: I've seen some some very critical um views on Dr
Speaker 1: Thomas holmes innovation here he introduced embalming the bodies and
Speaker 1: the preservative chemical of choice from about eighteen eighty to
Speaker 1: nineteen ten, including for Holmes himself was the use of arsenic.
Speaker 1: Oh no, yeah, which of course is is a poison
Speaker 1: as well as a de choice for embalming a dead body. Well,
Speaker 1: surely arsenic was replaced with something that's not as harmful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because the thing is, you're filling this body with poison
Speaker 1: and you're depositing it in the ground. Of course, the
Speaker 1: poison is going to get out of the body. Now
Speaker 1: the body, the poison is in the ground, the poison
Speaker 1: is potentially in the water and not just contained within
Speaker 1: the cemetery but also leaching out into the area surrounding
Speaker 1: the cemetery. So yes, we eventually that was replaced, but
Speaker 1: we replaced it with formaldehyde, which the Environmental Protection Agency
Speaker 1: currently list is a probable carcinogen. And each year in
Speaker 1: the United States alone, enough embalming fluid UH is pumped
Speaker 1: into the earth these corpses to feel eight Olympic sized
Speaker 1: swimming pools. That is disgusting. Well, let's let's talk about
Speaker 1: how it works. Okay, Well, I'm just gonna summarize here,
Speaker 1: and this is from actually how Stuff Works article How
Speaker 1: embalming Works. It's an excellent one of our cloud as
Speaker 1: articles there. Check it out if you want a more
Speaker 1: informed journey. But goes down like this body's place on
Speaker 1: a table, bathed and claint. Sounds good. That's pretty much
Speaker 1: every funeral practice ever. Right. Yeah. So next we find
Speaker 1: that embalming fluid gets injected into the arteries through a
Speaker 1: tube connected to an embalming machine. I don't know what
Speaker 1: that machine looks like, but it sounds kind of aggressive.
Speaker 1: You've seen phantasm and looks like okay, yeah. Anyway, they
Speaker 1: say that the fluids a combination of water and preservative chemicals,
Speaker 1: which would be like formaldehyde like we talked about a
Speaker 1: minute ago. And then because the chemical dehydrates and hardens
Speaker 1: the tissue. The fluid's presence inside the body works as
Speaker 1: a preservative by making the deceased and unsuitable host for
Speaker 1: bacteria and other organisms. And this slows the decomposition because
Speaker 1: it just makes the body an inhospitable place in the world. Yuh,
Speaker 1: all right. Next, the amount next is important and not
Speaker 1: The amount of fluid required through all steps varies based
Speaker 1: on a case by case analysis, but on average, an
Speaker 1: embalmer needs to use a gallon or three point eight
Speaker 1: liters of embalming solution for every fifty pounds or twenty
Speaker 1: two point seven of body weight. That is so much
Speaker 1: for amalde hyde. Now, so they've got to take the
Speaker 1: blood out right yep, So the blood by by blood? Yea,
Speaker 1: how comes the blood? Then the vessels are tied off
Speaker 1: and the incisions are sutured and closed. So I'm just
Speaker 1: closing any opening that remains there. The next you got
Speaker 1: to treat the internal body cavity. You do that by
Speaker 1: removing the liquids and gases and adding more of that
Speaker 1: embalming fluid. Yep. They need wash that body, you dress
Speaker 1: it up and of course apply cosmetics. This need be
Speaker 1: and obviously depending on the nature of death. There may
Speaker 1: be additional purely cosmetic procedures that have to take place
Speaker 1: if you're going to have the body be viewed, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in a very formal way. Yeah. Now, in
Speaker 1: the standard Western funerary practice today, once the embalming is done,
Speaker 1: you get the coffin right and go straight to the casket,
Speaker 1: so it is Dracula's bed. You you know what a
Speaker 1: coffin is, You've seen one before, but just to be clear,
Speaker 1: it's a box. It's usually made of wood or metal,
Speaker 1: and you place the dead body inside the box for burial.
Speaker 1: So they range from very basic like the pine box
Speaker 1: and the sort of as a light as I lay
Speaker 1: dying since and then you've got the elaborate, expensive ornate
Speaker 1: boxes with tropical woods that are yeah, you know, some
Speaker 1: people want them. I guess. The word coffin actually comes
Speaker 1: from the Greek and the Latin coffin us, which means basket. Okay,
Speaker 1: well this was This makes me think of the Egyptian
Speaker 1: model again, like the the evolution of that, because first
Speaker 1: it came just bare bodies thrown into the into a pit,
Speaker 1: and then they're wrapping them in something and eventually you're
Speaker 1: using a basket, and that's the evolution there into more
Speaker 1: traditional casketry. Yeah, the modern sarcophic guests. But but why coffins,
Speaker 1: Like why even have a coffin? So I think the
Speaker 1: ideas they serve as a basic type of barrier between
Speaker 1: the body and the elements or nature, and though they're
Speaker 1: typically not creating any kind of perfect seal, they slow
Speaker 1: the interaction between inside and outside, even though that's gonna
Speaker 1: happen eventually, because I mean, decomposition comes from without and within,
Speaker 1: Like some of the first things that happen are your
Speaker 1: your insides basically falling apart and rebelling and digesting itself.
Speaker 1: The bacteria inside you become opportunistic, they see a chance
Speaker 1: and they start showing down. And I guess the idea
Speaker 1: of slowing the rate of decomposition is a psychological comfort
Speaker 1: to some of the bereaved, thinking that will it'll just
Speaker 1: prevent I don't know that the corruption of the body
Speaker 1: of the dead loved one. I mean, I guess there
Speaker 1: is some idea associated with mummification and embalming that you're
Speaker 1: somehow preserving the dignity of the dead person by keeping
Speaker 1: them as long as possible from beginning to look like
Speaker 1: a dead person. Yeah, and I think it's important here
Speaker 1: to one thing I read and um, I think it
Speaker 1: was the History of Hell by Alice Kate Turner. I
Speaker 1: believe it's the author, uh that most people don't have
Speaker 1: like a worldview about death in the afterlife. They'll be
Speaker 1: sort of like a primary idea that you adhere to,
Speaker 1: but then you'll still also carry around other models in
Speaker 1: your head simultaneously. So I might be the type of
Speaker 1: person who, um has a very safe, secular idea of
Speaker 1: what happens when you die, that you just decompose and
Speaker 1: and then you're in the grave, but then I'm never
Speaker 1: really sure. Yeah, or it's like at some point you
Speaker 1: still have like this I d that you came up
Speaker 1: with that you grew up with about about an afterlife,
Speaker 1: or maybe you really like a particular magical model that
Speaker 1: involves ghosts or what happened, so that model is still
Speaker 1: kicking around. So when you're engaging with the dead body,
Speaker 1: yet you're not only pulling out your core belief system,
Speaker 1: the one that you you know would put on a poster,
Speaker 1: but you're also engaging with these these other models that
Speaker 1: are competing in the background. Yeah. And then of course
Speaker 1: there's also the widespread rationale that goes the other way.
Speaker 1: It says it's going to shield the external environment from
Speaker 1: being contaminated by the corpse. That could be especially important
Speaker 1: if you have pumped the corpse full of poisonous chemicals
Speaker 1: like from aldehyde. So people selling funeral services have sometimes
Speaker 1: claimed to offer coffins with greater and greater levels of
Speaker 1: security in the form of protective caskets, with something like
Speaker 1: a rubber gasket to seal the body off from the environment,
Speaker 1: as if this were desirable for some reason. And um,
Speaker 1: even if that kind of thing appeals to you, you
Speaker 1: don't want to seal a coffin too tightly because the
Speaker 1: decaying body produces gas, and if you don't allow for
Speaker 1: ventilation of this gas, the coffin can literally explode. This happens.
Speaker 1: I read a Washington Post st article about this, saying
Speaker 1: that some of these protective coffins really can cause this
Speaker 1: to happen. But then to prevent that, some of the
Speaker 1: so called protective coffins were created with semi permeable seals
Speaker 1: that allowed the coffin to burp as gas accumulates the
Speaker 1: burping casket. I like it, and then outside the casket
Speaker 1: you might also have another layer of protection, which would
Speaker 1: be these concrete burial vaults. This is an area that
Speaker 1: I really wasn't that familiar with tell um a my
Speaker 1: dad died and then be I wrote a short story
Speaker 1: involving a body coming out of a grave when I
Speaker 1: really had to sit down and realize, oh, yeah, there
Speaker 1: there are two different layers one would have to bust
Speaker 1: out off. Yeah, And I think you'll find these in
Speaker 1: a lot of graves today. From what I've read. Their
Speaker 1: main function is cosmetic. It's to protect the appearance of
Speaker 1: funeral grounds by preventing settling of the grave pit over time.
Speaker 1: So as a coffin and its contents began to decompose,
Speaker 1: they you know, they there's a vacuum of space basically
Speaker 1: in the dirt sinks down, Yeah, sunken graves. I spent
Speaker 1: part of my my childhood living in like really rural
Speaker 1: Tennessee near Kentucky Lake, and there were some old family
Speaker 1: cemeteries in the woods. The houses have been moved away
Speaker 1: ages ago because the flooding of the area for the
Speaker 1: damn But but you'd go out there and there would
Speaker 1: be these old grave sites and you knew there were
Speaker 1: grave sites because of the sunken graves where the body
Speaker 1: and the casket or whatever it was down there has
Speaker 1: just has flattened out. And uh, and so you just
Speaker 1: have this little dip that's creepy. You're saying, not even
Speaker 1: a headstone or with a headstone. Um, I feel like
Speaker 1: some of these head headstones, but not like really fancy ones,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, And I guess I can see where
Speaker 1: that would be a troubling idea because it it sends
Speaker 1: that very very direct message of absence of there's something gone,
Speaker 1: there's something depleted, that person that you loved is no
Speaker 1: longer here, and look here is the sunken grave to
Speaker 1: suggest that even physically they are no longer a part
Speaker 1: of this world. Yeah. And now, of course forces other
Speaker 1: than time and decomposition can also cause this. It can
Speaker 1: be a problem if a cemetery doesn't have concrete burial
Speaker 1: vaults on all of its coffins, because what if they
Speaker 1: need to drive the back ho over the cemetery grounds
Speaker 1: to dig out a grave and it causes the earth
Speaker 1: to collapse. That's a problem also. So so you've got
Speaker 1: to have these things if you want your symmetry grounds
Speaker 1: to you know, continually look flat and nice and not
Speaker 1: have collapsing areas, or there might be other solutions, but
Speaker 1: this is traditionally been a solution. So what is the
Speaker 1: impact of all all of this casketry? Well in grave
Speaker 1: Matters a journey through the modern funeral industry to a
Speaker 1: natural way of burial. The author Mark Harris says, on average,
Speaker 1: ten acres of cemetery ground contains enough coffin wood to
Speaker 1: build forty houses, almost one thousand tons of casket steel,
Speaker 1: twenty thousand tons of vault concrete, and enough toxic chemicals
Speaker 1: to fill a private swimming pool. I like this. It's
Speaker 1: like a backyard swimming pool, not an Olympic swimming pool.
Speaker 1: I love the swimming pool. As a standard measurement of foulness.
Speaker 1: Is that one of the is that one of the
Speaker 1: measures on wolf from alpha? It may be, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think so, I forget how it it converts into metrics,
Speaker 1: but yeah, okay, So that's some of the impact of
Speaker 1: of burial embalming. Putting in a casket or a vault
Speaker 1: and then burying it. It's not necessarily the most environmentally
Speaker 1: friendly way to do things, certainly not the cheapest, and
Speaker 1: there there are these problems. But also there are problems
Speaker 1: with cremation, right yeah. I mean the big one of
Speaker 1: course carbon emissions, because you're just burning a lot of stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: And also noting it's not just a matter of oh well,
Speaker 1: here's a body, I'm gonna catch it on fire, or
Speaker 1: here's a body in a casket, let's catch it on fire.
Speaker 1: You've got to produce the heat necessary to burn that
Speaker 1: body up, which means the use of fuel of some kind.
Speaker 1: So there's an added cost there. There's an added uh uh,
Speaker 1: there's an added emission cost there as well. And on
Speaker 1: top of that, you have all these bodies that are
Speaker 1: being burned up that have mercury in their tooth filling.
Speaker 1: So when you burn that up, you have the addition
Speaker 1: of mercury pollution. Oh man, that's gross. And I've got
Speaker 1: to read this quote from a BBC article. I read
Speaker 1: quote mercury from amalgam vaporized in crematory a is blamed
Speaker 1: for up to six of UK airborne mercury emissions. That's
Speaker 1: all from dead bodies. That is crazy. Um. Now, there
Speaker 1: are green crematories out there, um. And however, most of
Speaker 1: the green aspects of what's going on here are related
Speaker 1: to just, for instance, storing the dead up until they
Speaker 1: have enough to just deify the high heating costs, so
Speaker 1: like not burning one at a time, right, yeah, like
Speaker 1: wait until you have several. They need to make the
Speaker 1: most out of your fuel use. Because remember we're talking
Speaker 1: about necessary temperatures of six eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit eight
Speaker 1: d seventy one to nine eighty two degrees celsius necessary
Speaker 1: to burn the bodies up completely. It's the crematory equivalent
Speaker 1: of car pooling. Yeah, yeah, And and it makes sense,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're gonna you're gonna use this, this,
Speaker 1: this level of fuel to burn a body, go ahead
Speaker 1: and burn up several oneove and set it up. Now.
Speaker 1: In terms of figuring out the carbon emissions aspect of this,
Speaker 1: I did find an interesting two thousand thirteen study from
Speaker 1: the Desert Research Institute that ACTO actually looked into the
Speaker 1: pollution of crematory traditions in South Asia, where again, you know,
Speaker 1: we mentioned the Buddhist and Hindu models and how prevalent
Speaker 1: it is over there, and their findings were, first of all,
Speaker 1: that funeral pyre emissions contain sunlight absorbing organic carbon aerosols
Speaker 1: or brown carbon. And uh, and here's a quote, uh
Speaker 1: driving home the findings too, said the researchers estimate the
Speaker 1: mean light absorbing organic aerosol mass emitted from funeral pires
Speaker 1: to be equivalent of approximately of the total um carbon
Speaker 1: aerosol mass produced by anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels and
Speaker 1: ten percent of biofuels in the region. So it's a
Speaker 1: significant contribution. Yeah, no doubt. Now I can hear what
Speaker 1: you're probably back there thinking, because our listeners always love
Speaker 1: to suggest this option. You've got a problem with a
Speaker 1: thing on Earth, let's say it's radioactive waste, shoot it
Speaker 1: into space. Shoot it into space, they say. Now, if
Speaker 1: we've got problems with dead bodies on Earth piling up,
Speaker 1: you know, if you, uh, you want to bury them
Speaker 1: according to proper burial practices that are enforced by most
Speaker 1: cemetery as well, that's going to use a ton of
Speaker 1: concrete and steel and take up all this space and
Speaker 1: leak toxic chemicals into the ground. You want to burn them,
Speaker 1: it's going to release mercury and carbon emissions. So why
Speaker 1: don't we just shoot our dead bodies into space? So
Speaker 1: many problems with that model. Yeah, well, actually there there
Speaker 1: are huge problems with that model. But there are private
Speaker 1: companies that will dispose of your remains in space for
Speaker 1: a f D fee. If you want to pinch a penny,
Speaker 1: you can just have your cremains transported into space during
Speaker 1: a brief suborbital flight and then return to Earth for disposal.
Speaker 1: But that sounds kind of Are any of these companies
Speaker 1: offering full body disposal in space? They not that I
Speaker 1: know of. They might if the price were right, because
Speaker 1: that is going to be a heck of a price.
Speaker 1: Let me explain. So there are several companies that offer
Speaker 1: space burial packages. One of them is called Elysium Space. No,
Speaker 1: can you give me a little spacey music too? To
Speaker 1: play under while I read some of their materials? Beautiful okay?
Speaker 1: From their materials, Elysium Space offers families the ability to
Speaker 1: send a symbolic portion of cremated remains into the eternal
Speaker 1: wonders of the night sky forever in remembrance of our
Speaker 1: dearly departed. Through partnerships with the most reliable space transportation companies,
Speaker 1: Elysium Space provides unique celestial services. The Shooting Star Memorial
Speaker 1: Lunar Memorial and Milky Way Memorial to create an everlasting
Speaker 1: tribute and connective experience with those who have gone before us.
Speaker 1: The Lunar Memorial, they will actually send your remains to
Speaker 1: the move, so they claim. But we'll we'll get into this.
Speaker 1: So first things first, this is not talking about blowing
Speaker 1: your entire dead body out the airlock so that you
Speaker 1: know pieces of it are going to end up smacking
Speaker 1: into the observation window of the I s s here.
Speaker 1: What we're really talking about is something I might call
Speaker 1: cremation plus. So you are cremated. That is the method
Speaker 1: of disposal for your body. So we're keeping all the
Speaker 1: carbon emissions and everything, and then a quote symbolic portion
Speaker 1: of the ashes can be transported to space on one
Speaker 1: of these scheduled launches. Why just a symbolic portion, Well,
Speaker 1: it's because of cost. According to Thomas Sivett, the founder
Speaker 1: of Elysium Space, cremation usually leaves behind about six pounds
Speaker 1: of ashes. I looked at other places saying that the
Speaker 1: average cremation goes from three to nine pounds of stuff
Speaker 1: left over, and that's a lot of ashes. The cost
Speaker 1: of sending cargo into space into lower thorbit is calculated
Speaker 1: on a by weight basis. So if it's ten thousand
Speaker 1: dollars per pound of payload and you want to send
Speaker 1: six pounds of ashes into space, that's a sixty thou
Speaker 1: dollar journey. Would would the where would be exterment? If
Speaker 1: if intermin is burial in the grave, what would sending
Speaker 1: ashes into space b that? Yeah? Anyway, companies like Elysium
Speaker 1: Space would be limiting this symbolic portion of your remains
Speaker 1: to a quantity more in the realm of a ram
Speaker 1: or something. I wonder if you if you knew an astronaut,
Speaker 1: and granted it is a very small group of individuals,
Speaker 1: but if you knew somebody that was going into space,
Speaker 1: could you potentially bribe them to to smuggle up a
Speaker 1: symbolic sample of some ashes? Maybe you could. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know they have limited amounts of cargo
Speaker 1: they can bring with them, but maybe maybe would be
Speaker 1: worth their while to leave the iPod at home if
Speaker 1: you you know, if you grease their palm enough to
Speaker 1: replace it with a similar package of ashes. Well, that's
Speaker 1: supposedly how the moon exhibit got to the Moon. Did
Speaker 1: you ever read about this? Oh, there's potentially a tiny
Speaker 1: art exhibit on the Moon. I think it's disputed whether
Speaker 1: it's actually there or not, but it was this tiny
Speaker 1: art exhibit involving some kind of weird drawing of Andy
Speaker 1: Warhol's that looks like it is supposed to be a
Speaker 1: penis and uh and this tiny, tiny wafer of an
Speaker 1: art exhibit was supposedly left on the Moon by a
Speaker 1: team of astronauts who walked on the surface. Look it up.
Speaker 1: There's there's a funny Wikipedia page about it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: the package is offered by Elysium Space. This is great.
Speaker 1: So they've got the shooting Star memorial, that's one, and
Speaker 1: that puts that symbolic portion of your loved ones remains
Speaker 1: into orbit quote only to end this celestial journey as
Speaker 1: a shooting star. This is a nice way of saying
Speaker 1: that you're released into orbit and then your orbit decays
Speaker 1: until you burn up upon re entering the atmosphere, and
Speaker 1: then technically you're a shooting star, because that's what a
Speaker 1: shooting star is, something zipping and burning through the atmosphere
Speaker 1: as the reinners. Right. So, according to an article I
Speaker 1: read in Slate about this, the capsule will of course
Speaker 1: be way too small to see while it's in orbit.
Speaker 1: But Elysium has talked about creating an app that will
Speaker 1: let you track your loved ones remain so you can
Speaker 1: see where they are in the sky. So maybe then
Speaker 1: here's the one you asked about, the Lunar Memorial. This
Speaker 1: delivers that little graham of your remains are, however much
Speaker 1: to the surface of the Moon. Pretty cool, all right.
Speaker 1: They say it's nine thousand and fifty dollars for the
Speaker 1: first fifty takers, and then it's eleven, nine hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty for anybody after that, and then they've got the
Speaker 1: Milky Way Memorial, which is I think the prices to
Speaker 1: be determined there, which would send that little part of
Speaker 1: your ashes into deep space. It's sort of do it yourself.
Speaker 1: I looked at how it works. They mail you a kit,
Speaker 1: so it's kind of like the you know, the DNA
Speaker 1: testing kits or something, but they mail you a kit
Speaker 1: with a space grade anatized aluminum alloy receptacle, and then
Speaker 1: you spoon some of the ashes into the receptacle with
Speaker 1: a complementary scoop, and then you send it back and
Speaker 1: they take care of the rest according to their launch
Speaker 1: schedule on their website. There are a couple of these
Speaker 1: Shooting Star package launches lined up for late I don't
Speaker 1: know anymore. We'll we'll see if that happens, or see
Speaker 1: how that goes. But this is actually not the only
Speaker 1: company in the space burial game. People like Timothy Leary
Speaker 1: and Gene Roddenberry have already had their remains shot out
Speaker 1: into space. The previous big player in this game was
Speaker 1: a company called Celestis, and I think they're still around
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, still doing what they do,
Speaker 1: and they offer packages that from what I could tell,
Speaker 1: we're a little bit more expensive than the ones by
Speaker 1: Elysium Space. Well, both are pretty expensive, but but at
Speaker 1: least with the Elysium Space in the picture, it looks
Speaker 1: like the market is continuing to diversify. I don't know
Speaker 1: if this will become big business. I it's hard to tell. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: to what extent to people really get behind this idea
Speaker 1: that I mean, it's it's so out of keeping with
Speaker 1: the natural process that we've talked about. I mean, and
Speaker 1: it's also just cremation plus, but it's it's like cremation plus,
Speaker 1: we're gonna also always some fuel on sending this up
Speaker 1: into orbit or to the moon. Um Whereas, at least
Speaker 1: for me, I I find the idea of recycling the
Speaker 1: soil far more attractive. But but that's just me, and
Speaker 1: some people want the more cosmic modeling. Well, I can
Speaker 1: see how the I can see the appeal of the
Speaker 1: cosmic model, even though I'm not a person who's ever,
Speaker 1: at least so far in my life, been all that
Speaker 1: particular about what happens to my body after I die,
Speaker 1: as long as it's not something that's grossly environmentally unsound
Speaker 1: or or involving traditional embalming. And yeah, I mean I'm
Speaker 1: kind of the same. Ultimately, the barrel barrel is about
Speaker 1: the survivors, you know, so it's it's kind of up
Speaker 1: to down and what's going to make them happy. But
Speaker 1: I can see the appeal of the space launch as
Speaker 1: it kind of plays on the Williams Sapphire contingency speech
Speaker 1: for the loss of the Apollo eleven crew. Have you
Speaker 1: ever read this? I believe I have, but it's been
Speaker 1: a while. It's very strangely moving, it's very short, and
Speaker 1: it's also hard to imagine Richard Nixon reading this then.
Speaker 1: But supposedly if the crew members of the Apollo eleven.
Speaker 1: We're not going to be able to make it back
Speaker 1: from the moon. This was the speech that was going
Speaker 1: to be read, and it talks about, you know, a
Speaker 1: piece of humankind being coming part of the stars for
Speaker 1: forever um and it's very moving. I mean, that's the thing, right,
Speaker 1: any of these the funeral practice we've discussed so far,
Speaker 1: it's it's like fift what you're actually doing with the
Speaker 1: body and uh sales pitch right, fifty percent presentation cosmology,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's how do you describe what's happening?
Speaker 1: Because on one hand, you could say, oh, well, they
Speaker 1: threw a dead body on top of a tower and
Speaker 1: a bunch of vultures ripped it apart. Or you can
Speaker 1: say the body was was unclean and these uh, these
Speaker 1: holy creatures came and dismantled it and made it pure again.
Speaker 1: You know, it's all about how you sell it right. Well,
Speaker 1: no matter what, it's gonna involve death and decomposition, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's still getting around that. Well, I mean, essentially there's
Speaker 1: no getting around the fact that the body will be
Speaker 1: broken down or preserved forever in some way. That's also
Speaker 1: not all that squeaky and clean. Well, I mean, eventually
Speaker 1: we get the heat death of the universe, so something's
Speaker 1: gonna happen. Now, I'd be remiss if we didn't mention
Speaker 1: cryo preservation. Uh, this is a This is of course
Speaker 1: the topic onto its own I think. I think there's
Speaker 1: an older episode of Stuff to Blow your mind, maybe
Speaker 1: even stuff in the Science Lab that goes into this,
Speaker 1: and it's probably a topic that we could revisit on
Speaker 1: its own episode in the future. And of course this
Speaker 1: is the practice where we have a legally dead body
Speaker 1: that is then frozen. Uh. And then sometimes it's just
Speaker 1: neuro preservation, so it's just a head, a frozen head
Speaker 1: that's preserved. With the idea here being that you're kind
Speaker 1: of gambling on the possibility that at some point in
Speaker 1: the future will have the technology to take a frozen
Speaker 1: legally dead body or a frozen head and bring it
Speaker 1: back to life or resurrected in some way, um heal
Speaker 1: the problems that are inherent in the body. Imagine it
Speaker 1: will probably be future Alma style. Yeah, future the future
Speaker 1: AUMA model is definitely one I keep coming back to.
Speaker 1: And you know, and it also there are a lot
Speaker 1: of factors here, like was was the body frozen in
Speaker 1: a way that doesn't destroy tissue? Is it cared for
Speaker 1: and maintained during this period? These are all pitfalls that
Speaker 1: the sort of litter the history of cryopreservation. Uh. Thus
Speaker 1: far and uh and you know it's it's again it's
Speaker 1: a gamble is will these bodies be brought back to life?
Speaker 1: Will these heads be brought back life? Maybe not? Uh.
Speaker 1: It's ultimately not that different from the Egyptian bottle of mummification,
Speaker 1: right where it's all about preparing the body for a
Speaker 1: journey into a distant world in a distant age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's stalking the body up with everything it's about to
Speaker 1: needy and uh and and it's an expensive model. All right.
Speaker 1: So we've discussed the old ways, we've discussed some of
Speaker 1: the current ways out there, even if some of them
Speaker 1: are a little bit futuristic. But now let's talk about
Speaker 1: where we're going. Yeah, So one of the big solutions
Speaker 1: to all these problems we've been talking about is what's
Speaker 1: sometimes just called natural burial, just straight up natural burial
Speaker 1: or green burial. Uh. And in recent years you've seen
Speaker 1: a revival of these types of practices This is burial
Speaker 1: of bodies without all the concrete, steel, the carved tropical wood,
Speaker 1: the formale hyde. The philosophy is one of let nature
Speaker 1: take its course, sort of like the sky burial model,
Speaker 1: except it typically does involve interment in the ground. But
Speaker 1: there seemed to be a lot of benefits of this.
Speaker 1: So it's getting rid of all these poisonous embalming fluids
Speaker 1: and and unnatural metal and concrete substances in the body.
Speaker 1: And it has come along with what are sometimes referred
Speaker 1: to as green cemeteries, which are places that encourage the
Speaker 1: green burial practice and and help you make it take
Speaker 1: place in at least one a r P pole. More
Speaker 1: than seventy percent of people who were asked about this
Speaker 1: UH picked green burial as the most appealing option for
Speaker 1: their burial, Which is kind of weird because you feel
Speaker 1: like practices haven't really caught up with what people want. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because there are a number of I mean, just you're
Speaker 1: dealing with with varying like local regulations and even more
Speaker 1: overarching regulations UH surrounding the burial of the dead that
Speaker 1: are based on the embalming model. Right. Yeah, As you
Speaker 1: mentioned before, a lot of times when a loved one
Speaker 1: has died. People aren't aware of what their options really are.
Speaker 1: Do I have to have a concrete burial vault? Do
Speaker 1: I have to get it in embalmed? You know? Does
Speaker 1: this sealed metal coffin have to explode? And in some
Speaker 1: places there there might be, like you said, laws are
Speaker 1: regulations that say, no, this is where and how you
Speaker 1: can bury. You're dead, and this is what you have
Speaker 1: to do. In other cases there might just be cemeteries
Speaker 1: that privately enforce their own policies. And you know, that
Speaker 1: might be like, you can't be buried in our cemetery
Speaker 1: unless you have a concrete vault or something. But green
Speaker 1: cemeteries can help make those natural options clear and available
Speaker 1: to the consumer. And so typically this is just going
Speaker 1: to be plane burial in a kind of shroud or
Speaker 1: a biodegradable casket that's you know, cardboard or would or
Speaker 1: something like that, or even just a blanket. Now, tell
Speaker 1: me about the pet cemetery with an as option. Well,
Speaker 1: there you find a place for the ground wind sour
Speaker 1: possibly due to wind to go infestations, and then you
Speaker 1: bury naturally the green burial the old way though disclaimers
Speaker 1: sometimes dead is better Okay, well that's that's definitely an
Speaker 1: option for for the Stephen King fans out there, of
Speaker 1: whom I am one. Um. Now, if you want to
Speaker 1: a different model, and a model that kind of comes
Speaker 1: back to our early example of the the Irish soldier
Speaker 1: pulled up by the tree, you can just straight up
Speaker 1: become a tree. Kind of an extension of the green
Speaker 1: burial that we've already discussed, an extension of natural burial
Speaker 1: that is a little more rigorously designed. And in this
Speaker 1: we were looking at a project that comes that came
Speaker 1: from Italian designers Anna Satelli and Raoul Bretzel, and this
Speaker 1: is called Capsula Mundy or World Pods um And and
Speaker 1: this is really elegant. I really like it. It's still
Speaker 1: kind of in the design phase. They're saying that instead
Speaker 1: of a cemetery, let's have sacred forests. And you create
Speaker 1: these these sacred forests by planting a tree atop the
Speaker 1: burial of a special egg shaped corn starch pod. So
Speaker 1: it's like a corn starch pod that contains the dead
Speaker 1: body curled up in a fetal position, and then you
Speaker 1: just let nature take its course down there. It breaks
Speaker 1: down and then the nutrients from that dead body feed
Speaker 1: the tree that takes life above it. That sounds beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it would be great to become a tree.
Speaker 1: I think so too. I I've I've thought about this
Speaker 1: before and often wonder though then that you then put
Speaker 1: increased um demands on the care of that tree, Like,
Speaker 1: then what happens if that tree dies? Because we've all
Speaker 1: I don't know if we all, but some of us
Speaker 1: have planted trees in our backyard before and uh and
Speaker 1: watch them die, And that would be extra disheartening if
Speaker 1: this was you know, uncle Uncle Clark's tree. Now Uncle
Speaker 1: Clark became this horrible dead tree that or he became
Speaker 1: one of the talking trees from the Wizard of Oz. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I feel like I wonder if there's not some
Speaker 1: room for dangerous personification of the tree in these in
Speaker 1: these examples, as elegant and beautiful as the example is. Oh,
Speaker 1: but just think what kinds of great Halloween lore this
Speaker 1: would create. You know, the forest where all the trees
Speaker 1: grew out of a corpse. I mean, what a what
Speaker 1: a wonderful setting for the ghost lore of the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I you know there are cemeteries out there
Speaker 1: that of course you'll find plenty that are finally manicured
Speaker 1: and and mode, and then people bring in flowers. But
Speaker 1: you'll still find other cemeteries where they allow the weeds
Speaker 1: and the wild flowers to grow up all around them.
Speaker 1: And I think that they'll tend to find those to
Speaker 1: be very very peaceful places. You know. I like the vibe,
Speaker 1: so ultimately I like the the idea of the body
Speaker 1: breaking down and becoming nature again. Okay, So so that's
Speaker 1: the natural green way, either just natural burial or maybe
Speaker 1: burial in a pod that becomes a tree or something
Speaker 1: like that. We could also look at the sort of
Speaker 1: the lab model, yes, for the green disposal. And one
Speaker 1: of the ideas that I came across here, which I
Speaker 1: just thought was amazing, is called promission. What is this,
Speaker 1: Robert Well, This comes to us from the Swedish company
Speaker 1: pro Mesha organic a b founded by Suzanne wig Massak.
Speaker 1: And this is how it breaks down. First of all,
Speaker 1: the corpse is frozen too negative eighteen degrees celsius or
Speaker 1: zero degrees fahrenheit, and then submerged in liquid nitrogen. All right.
Speaker 1: Then the frozen, brittle corpse is gently bombarded with sound
Speaker 1: waves which break it down into a fine white powder.
Speaker 1: And I've also read that an adapted muscle stimulation machine
Speaker 1: is used for this, so I imagine we're talking an
Speaker 1: ultrasonic stimulator. Uh. Still, I think that the van damn
Speaker 1: time coop kick or a grenade launcher should still be
Speaker 1: an option for the shattering of your corps. Or you
Speaker 1: could also do the sub zero yes, yes, a good
Speaker 1: like ninja backhand, backfist kind of thing. Alright. So, um,
Speaker 1: then you have this powder, and the powder is sent
Speaker 1: through a vacuum chain or that evaporates all the water
Speaker 1: because the water belongs to the tribe, as we discussed
Speaker 1: in our our down episodes, and then the water, and
Speaker 1: since water is seventy of the body, I mean, it
Speaker 1: makes sense to remove that, uh and return it to
Speaker 1: the tribe. Then this powder, this pure powder um is
Speaker 1: taken and you pick any metal objects out of it,
Speaker 1: like fillings or whatnot, and dispose of those properly. But
Speaker 1: then you're just left with this straight up corpse powder
Speaker 1: devoid of water. It's easier to break break that down
Speaker 1: in the soil than a corpse, so you just spread it,
Speaker 1: bury it however you want to deal with it. It's
Speaker 1: like perfect the perfect ashes of a body without having
Speaker 1: to actually burn it up and engage in that fuel loss.
Speaker 1: That's great. So freeze you, shatter you, scatter you in
Speaker 1: a shallow grave, and that sounds kind of beautiful. There's
Speaker 1: another one that is maybe less beautiful but very cool,
Speaker 1: called resummation or resummation. It's sort of a trade name,
Speaker 1: I think for alkaline hydrolysis. Yeah, this is a it's
Speaker 1: often termed in a biocremation. So what you're doing is
Speaker 1: you're using heated water and potassium hydroxide for LIE to
Speaker 1: liquefy the body and leave only bones behind, and then
Speaker 1: you take then the Once you have the bones, then hey,
Speaker 1: you kind of follow the straight up sky burial model
Speaker 1: and you just pulverize those and then you return the
Speaker 1: bone fragments to the family. Yeah, so the body goes
Speaker 1: into this giant steel vessel with water and LIE gets
Speaker 1: heated up very hot to run three hundred or three
Speaker 1: hundred fifty degrees fahrenheit under high pressure, so essentially a
Speaker 1: live filled pressure cooker. And you get left there for
Speaker 1: a few hours and then you melt and then it's
Speaker 1: onto the crimulator. With the crimulator that's a real word.
Speaker 1: It's the machine that grinds down the bones to create
Speaker 1: the powder that you get to take home. I think
Speaker 1: the crimulator could be the next great um wrestling gimmick
Speaker 1: if there any pro wrestlers out there. If you need
Speaker 1: a gimmick, go with the Crimulator. I like it. But
Speaker 1: this is cited as a greener alternative to burial and
Speaker 1: cremation because it produces far fewer carbon emissions than cremation
Speaker 1: and it uses less energy. So if you like the
Speaker 1: environment and you like melt movies, maybe you should see
Speaker 1: about having yourself melted. Though it's not necessarily available everywhere,
Speaker 1: people in the United States apparently have not always been
Speaker 1: really keen on the idea of liquid cremation. It is
Speaker 1: legal in some states in the U s according to
Speaker 1: at least one website I found. It's legal in Georgia,
Speaker 1: but not according to another one, so I'm not quite
Speaker 1: sure what the laways on that. In two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: a funeral director named Jeff Edwards liquefied nineteen bodies through
Speaker 1: alkaline hydrolysis in Ohio before the state officials effectively shut
Speaker 1: him down by denying him burial permits, claiming that the
Speaker 1: practice was not in alignment with state regulations. Uh. Edwards
Speaker 1: had been referring to the practice practice by the name aquamation.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what that means. Yeah, you need a
Speaker 1: different term than just horpse liquefication, because that just sounds
Speaker 1: a bit too um you know, robot apocalypse. I guess yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess so. Anyway, apparently Catholic organizations have or some
Speaker 1: at least have been fighting the legality of this in Ohio.
Speaker 1: According to one, the idea of dissolving the body is
Speaker 1: not showing proper respect to the body in this we
Speaker 1: we see this again and again throughout history. In Mary
Speaker 1: Roach's book Stiff, she mentions at one point this idea
Speaker 1: that what we could take bodies and use them for fuel,
Speaker 1: and that was that was just completely shouted down. Is disrespectful.
Speaker 1: But ultimately, we're talking about the processing of a dead body,
Speaker 1: and and sometimes that means just approaching it in a
Speaker 1: very scientific and um, you know, less emotional way. And uh.
Speaker 1: And when we do that, there's inevitably going to be
Speaker 1: someone or a group of people, whole organizations that say, WHOA,
Speaker 1: slow down here, you're not processing our corpse, we're bearing
Speaker 1: them we are. We are we're allowing their passage into
Speaker 1: the after like we're approaching this with with decorum. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: a scientific or clinical approach to the disposal of a
Speaker 1: corpse is often viewed as somehow vaguely sociopathic, like, you know,
Speaker 1: you're not showing proper respect to the person. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's necessarily the case. I mean, you might just
Speaker 1: not feel that the body represents what the person is.
Speaker 1: But one example of this is that there was legislation
Speaker 1: in New York State that was supposed to make alkaline
Speaker 1: hydrolysis legal there, and it was apparently referred to by
Speaker 1: detractors as the Hannibal Lecter's Bill, apparently a play on
Speaker 1: the name of Senator Kimp Hannon, who sponsored the bill.
Speaker 1: That's it seems unfair, Yeah, because I think in any
Speaker 1: of these cases, yes, there's a model of it where
Speaker 1: someone could just very coldly dismantle or process a body.
Speaker 1: But in the same way someone could very coldly embalm
Speaker 1: a body. You know, it's just there are ways to
Speaker 1: carry out these procedures that that honored the day. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, alkaline hydrolysis has already been used to get
Speaker 1: rid of animal bodies and medical cadavers at the Mayo Clinic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so why not as a as a standard option for
Speaker 1: the disposal of the dead. All right, And that brings
Speaker 1: us to what Joe the mushroom death Suit. Yes, kind
Speaker 1: of a superstar of the Internet over the past a
Speaker 1: couple of years. I guess, uh because I remember seeing
Speaker 1: like when the initial stories came out about the TED Talk,
Speaker 1: and then eventually the TED Talk came out as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a few years old now, so officially it's going
Speaker 1: to be called the Infinity burial Suit. But come on,
Speaker 1: you know, let's dispense with the sanitized language. It's a
Speaker 1: mushroom death suit. So the artist and inventor Jay Rim
Speaker 1: Lee gave a TED talk in July two thousand eleven
Speaker 1: to introduce this concept of what she called the Infinity
Speaker 1: Mushroom and the suit that helps the Infinity mushroom eat you. So,
Speaker 1: the Infinity Mushroom is the idea of a strain of
Speaker 1: mushroom that's trained to rapidly consume dead human flesh, and
Speaker 1: Lee claims that she herself has been training Petrie dishes
Speaker 1: of mycological tissue culture, which is fungus to eat her hair,
Speaker 1: her fingernails, or dead skin cells. Uh. And this is
Speaker 1: a specific instance of the concept of decompic culture, which
Speaker 1: is an idea originating with the entomologist Timothy Miles, in
Speaker 1: which we essentially grow and cultivate our own decomposers the
Speaker 1: same way we grow and cultivate our own food crops
Speaker 1: or our draft animals. And the suit is simply an
Speaker 1: organic cotton suit. It looks kind of like black pajamas
Speaker 1: with white veins spreading across the outside of the body.
Speaker 1: It looks vaguely futuristic, kind of Starfleet. Yeah. Apparently the
Speaker 1: white veins were said to represent the mycelium, the sort
Speaker 1: of roots that the mushrooms put out. And this suit
Speaker 1: has fungal spores embedded. And I believe the idea is
Speaker 1: that once the perfect strain of fungus has been created
Speaker 1: for the purpose of eating you, it's spores will be
Speaker 1: embedded in the suit, and then your body goes in
Speaker 1: the suit and then they chow down. According to a
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven interview with New Scientists, she mentioned that
Speaker 1: the suit as it was might not be friendly enough
Speaker 1: to the mushroom spores and talked about you know the
Speaker 1: possibility that she might have to coax the spores to
Speaker 1: continue eating with a second skin of gelatin inside the suit.
Speaker 1: I find the aesthetics of this idea oddly compelling. But
Speaker 1: if this thing ever were made widely available, I wonder
Speaker 1: how many people would actually buy it and use it. Well,
Speaker 1: this could be an aspect of the project. There's more
Speaker 1: art and science, right, because ultimately the mushroom death suit
Speaker 1: is less about her saying, hey, this is this thing
Speaker 1: we should all wear, and more about presenting uh, an
Speaker 1: extreme but aesthetically pleasing model of the kinds of burial
Speaker 1: practices we could be moving towards. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: high fashion, right Nobody. No, nobody looks at that futuristic,
Speaker 1: crazy like square dress on a catwalk and says, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to wear that, And the fashion designer probably
Speaker 1: doesn't think that either. But it's about presenting this, uh,
Speaker 1: this extreme idea that will then pull us in its direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see that. How It's sort of a it's
Speaker 1: the concept that filters down rather than the exact explicit design,
Speaker 1: And the concept really isn't all that different from the
Speaker 1: idea of sky burial, Whereas with sky burial, You're you're
Speaker 1: talking more about direct access to larger animal scavenging birds.
Speaker 1: This is providing access to smaller decomposers, the fungus, the
Speaker 1: tiny microscopic things that will still eat us the same
Speaker 1: way the vultures will. I think the problem here is
Speaker 1: that um in the sky burial model, the carrying birds
Speaker 1: have have an elevated status, and there there's a there's
Speaker 1: a magic to them, and we need to We need
Speaker 1: more magic with our mushrooms. We need mushroom gods. We
Speaker 1: need to worship the mushroom. Yes, we need we need
Speaker 1: some troom bay maybe love crafty and deities that we
Speaker 1: have to deal with, some sort of Nego goddess, or
Speaker 1: perhaps the mushroom goddess of dungeons and dragons. I can't
Speaker 1: remember her name off hand, but I know she's in
Speaker 1: the back of the campaign book that I just picked up. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: one's always tempted to think that the machine elves are
Speaker 1: in fact mushrooms of some kind. In reaction to this
Speaker 1: mushroom thing, I thought some of the comments sections on
Speaker 1: these articles were sort of weird because people seem surprisingly
Speaker 1: gung ho about it, or conversely reacting negatively with what
Speaker 1: seemed to me patently irrational reasoning, with people seeming to
Speaker 1: think things like the fungal composition would be painful. Well,
Speaker 1: it comes back to like the the irresistible urge to
Speaker 1: humanize the dead body. You know, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: caskets and about like sealing it off and that being
Speaker 1: a huge aspect of it. But then it's ultimately like
Speaker 1: I feel like, I feel like Grandpa would like a
Speaker 1: comfy pillow. I feel like Grandpa would be more comfortable.
Speaker 1: I would be more comfortable if we just aligned the
Speaker 1: whole thing with pillows. Yeah, ry are their cushions inside
Speaker 1: of coffin? Yeah? And then it just gets just spirals
Speaker 1: out of control from there. So yeah, we can't help
Speaker 1: but look at the body and think, I don't want
Speaker 1: something painful to happen to that body if that can
Speaker 1: no longer feel pain and it's no longer a person,
Speaker 1: but we do it anyway, just human nature. I guess
Speaker 1: it is all right. So there you have it. Burial
Speaker 1: some old options, some current options, some futuristic near future
Speaker 1: options for your consideration. Uh. In the meantime, checkout stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your mind dot com. That's where we find
Speaker 1: all the podcast episodes. That's where we find videos, blog posts,
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Speaker 1: your mind. One word and if you want to let
Speaker 1: us know about the coolest way of disposing of human
Speaker 1: remains you've ever heard of, or want to let us
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Speaker 1: after your death, you can email us at Blow the
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