Posted by
michael
on from the burial-not-exactly-the-right-word dept.
roman_mir writes "Celestis is the name of a company that is offering space burials for some $11K USD. Isn't this nice, like there is not enough garbage in space already... So, how many of you want to be buried in space? I want to burn in the Sun (or at least the egomaniacal part of me.)"
Special 'Delivery' Instructions
by
PakProtector
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· Score: 5, Funny
PS: Please aim at the section of space that in the 23rd century will be off limits to all spacefarers, in which resides the Genesis planet. Please make sure to also provide good embalming and a capsule capable of shielding body from cosmic rays.
--
Edward@Tomato -/home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Broadcasting dead...
by
LostCluster
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· Score: 5, Interesting
As a lower cost option, these people allow you to broadcast a digital message which can contain any audio or picture format you want into space.
They call the service Ad Astra. I like the dobule meaning of the word "ad" in that name...
Re:Broadcasting dead...
by
DarthWiggle
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· Score: 5, Funny
so, like, Space Spam?
Re:Broadcasting dead...
by
calmdude
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· Score: 5, Funny
What would one say on one of these things?
A) I'm coming home momma!
B) Please rectally probe the following people who bullied me in school...
C) Please view the accompanying transmitted picture... does this dress make me look fat?
Re:Broadcasting dead...
by
Greg@UF
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· Score: 5, Funny
I want to say "This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off"
-- -- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!
Re:Broadcasting dead...
by
Veridium
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· Score: 5, Funny
Yes, exactly. This will be an excellent way to get aliens to visit us. Once they hear we have penis enlargement pills, breast enlargement pills, and all natural herbal viagra alternatives, they'll be pouring in.
-- Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Re:Broadcasting dead...
by
unitron
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· Score: 4, Interesting
"The civilisation that blurts out its existence on interstellar beacons at the first opportunity may be like some early hominid descending from the trees and calling "Here Kitty" to a sabre toothed tiger."--Robert Rood
Only in this case it's more like "Klingon want some Viagra?".
--
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Re:Broadcasting dead...
by
sadomikeyism
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· Score: 5, Funny
Actually, I can forsee an intergalactic market for human ash pills. Like the chinese penchant for tiger penises and rhino tusks, human ash capsules will be 'herbal viagra'. Considering how much the media act like dick heads all the time, media that is streaming out into space, I am sure the aliens would look at our ash capsules as aphrodesiacs.
-- "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
Re:Broadcasting dead...
by
Camel+Pilot
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Too bad getting getting your DNA sequenced still costs too much.
Would be kinda cool to send the instructions to build youself out into the cosmos. I am sure one could calculate the probability of a significantly advanced live form to intercept your message and build a clone of you just for the heck of it.
Hmmm i think i smell a great plot for sci fi story.
Take down a space station
by
Jad+LaFields
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· Score: 5, Funny
To much garbage in space? Man that would my point for being 'buried' in space... to become a potentially dangerous piece of space debris! It would be like coming back from the dead to strike fear in the hearts of the living!
-- [SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
Re:Take down a space station
by
doj8
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· Score: 5, Informative
According to this article (http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html):
"A 1999 study estimated there are some 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit, just one part of a celestial sea of roughly 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter -- each big enough to damage a satellite or space-based telescope."
Of them, "8,927 are man-made objects which are officially tracked."
-- --
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.
Re:Take down a space station
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Informative
But then they'll shoot you down with lasers.
http://www.seds.org/pub/info/newsletters/spacevi ew s/text/20000821.txt
NASA to Test Laser "Broom" to Clean Space Junk
NASA plans to test a laser system in 2003 that may help clear low-Earth orbit of debris that could pose a risk to the shuttle and space station.
New Scientist magazine reported in its current issue that a shuttle flight in 2003 will test Project Orion, a groundbased laser system that would act as a "broom", sweeping out small debris from orbit.
During the mission the shuttle will release small instrumented objects designed to simulate space debris. The objects will be equipped with GPS receivers so that their positions can be tracked as they are illuminated by a groundbased megawatt-power laser. The laser will vaporize part of the object's surface, creating a small amount of thrust that slows the object down and eventually causes it to reenter the Earth's atmosphere.
If successful, the system could be used to clear out low-Earth orbit of small pieces of orbital debris that, because of their high velocities, can cause significant damage if they strike a spacecraft. "With a laser system we could clear from orbit all the debris between 1 and 10 centimeters [0.4 to 4 inches] in size within two years," said Jonathan Campbell, head of the Project Orion effort at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
That size range is significant because debris of that size poses the greatest risk. Shielding on spacecraft can protect them from objects smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in.), while those larger than 10 cm (4 in.) across can be tracked from the ground and spacecraft moved to avoid them. Between 1 and 10 cm, though, are objects too small to be tracked from the ground and too large to be effectively shielded against.
Campbell and others involved with Project Orion (first described in SpaceViews in 1997) are optimistic that lasers can clear low-Earth orbits effectively and at a relatively modest cost. "We now know we can decelerate and de-orbit the debris with the types of laser that are available to us," based on a series of recent tests on the ground, he said.
A two-year effort to clear debris from orbit would cost about $200 million, Campbell estimated. By comparison, the cost of a single space shuttle mission has been estimated to be as much as a half- billion dollars.
I want to burn in the Sun
by
Threni
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· Score: 5, Insightful
We all will...eventually. You'll be dead anyway, so why does it matter if you get toasted in the months following your death rather than a few hundred million?
This seems awfully affordable for launching anything in to space. Even if it is cremated remains, I would have expectede that it would be more expensive. Their webpage claims they have two of these in orbit already though. So all I need to do is find $11k and then cremate myself...
Only $11,000? Thats pretty cheap, considering the cost of taking a pound of gear into orbit. How do they get human remains that light? Even when you cremate a body, significant bones and dust remain. What do they do, throw away most of it and just send up a little bit of each person on their sattelite? Cremated remains can weigh upwards of two to five pounds. I'm wondering if this is all a scam, considering the high cost of burial space in certain geographical areas. In some places, a burial plot can cost even more than $11,000.
-- Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Moon Miner's Manifesto has a piece on how the Celestis capsule will only be in orbit for a year before the ashes meet a fiery end and proposes other and similar methods of putting remains in space.
-- Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
You want to burn in the Sun?
by
skyhawker
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· Score: 5, Funny
No problem. Just get buried here on earth. Eventually, your wish will be granted. And since you're dead, the wait will be quite bearable.:-)
--
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank. -- Scotty.
Re:You want to burn in the Sun?
by
polymath69
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· Score: 4, Funny
No problem. Just get buried here on earth. Eventually, your wish will be granted.
Exactly. Once the sun goes red-giant, its radius will be far larger
than the orbital distance of this little planet. So everyone's bones will eventually wind up toast.
Worried about global warming? Now that's global warming.
--
-- I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be
in charge of mayonnaise.
Interesting Terminology
by
calmdude
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The phrase that is used is being "buried in space". Quite obviously, one cannot be literally buried in space. What they do is cremate and eject the remains into stellar space.
I don't remember anyone saying Gene Roddenberry was buried in space....I wonder if he was the first person to voluntarily have his remains ejected into space.
I bet not many people will want to...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
...burn in Uranus.
There were already remains in orbit
by
TotallyUseless
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· Score: 4, Interesting
LSD Guru Tim Leary, Gene Roddenberry, and 22 others had their remains shot up into orbit in a capsule in 1997. The capsule was supposed to remain in orbit for around 18 months, then burn up on reentry into the atmosphere, for a double cremation!
This would be a great way to test the Missle Defense System. I don't know about anyone else, but personally I wouldn't mind being put to rest in a big explosion at the cost to the U.S. taxpayer.
A quarter ounce or less...
by
LostCluster
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· Score: 4, Informative
For those imagining yourself in a coffin in space, try again. Only 7 grams (less than 1/4 of an ounce) is sent up in the full version of their "Earthview" service, which involves a craft that projects the ashes out into "orbit" (not exactly one that can be tracked) while the craft itself vaporizes in the atmosphere. A discount version involves only one gram of ashes.
Other services mention only a "symbolic portion", and its questionable whether they even exist. The only non-"Earthview" activity was purchasing a capsule on a NASA mission that was headed to the moon. I presume their deep space service would be offered the same way...
Re:Cemeteries are landfills
by
damiam
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· Score: 5, Informative
Cemetaries don't last forever. They can be reused every few hundred years.
-- It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Bad idea
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
So when Armageddon arrives and all those dead try to rise from their graves while orbiting some far-off celestial body, how's THAT gonna work? It's almost like these guys haven't thought this whole thing through very well.
Re:Only so much carbon...
by
beeplet
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· Score: 5, Informative
Considering the earth accumulates 30 million kg of space dust each year, I don't think this will be a problem. (http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news19.html)
on a serious note...
by
databeast
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· Score: 5, Interesting
..I've always thought that space burials are one of the best ways we have a shot at 'meeting' alien races.
Yes, many of these coffin launches are going to get sucked up into solar gravity wells and burn up, but some are going to get caught in orbits around low-atmosphere bodies or other survivable situations.
My thinking behind this? the universe isnt *that* old compared to its predicted total lifespan; humankind may indeed be one of the 'first races'. By the time enough life-bearing planets produce that cycle, humanity may already be several hundred million years extinct. But putting our 'relics' (ie our corpses) out into the void, where they may survive fairly intact for far longer (assuming they have the sense to vacuum-pack our corpsicles) we stand a fair chance that something out in the distant future is going to find one of these human relics, and if they havent watched enough sci-fi, probably resurrect the human race from our DNA:-)
[seriously, blasting your corpse into space probably has more value to it than any current cyrogenics program, as far as the odds of you being resurrected go, the cost of maintenance,[hopefuly none] and value to the human race (lets face it, most of the people going into alcor drums we probably dont want back!)
Certainly, I'd like to do this, on the condition that the launch params were sufficient to give me a good shot at escaping the sol system limits and not returning to ground as space-trash on one of our neighboring planets.
These guys will PAY for your space burial!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
These guys are willing to pay up to $10,000,000 of your funeral expenses, provided you get your corpse up there yourself!
Re:Only so much carbon...
by
kfg
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· Score: 5, Informative
The earth's mass increases by tons a day, from the influx of space stuff. It doesn't really matter, as a percentage of the earth's mass the stuff that comes in and what we ship out is waaaaaay below the level of significant digits.
I could sit here half the night listing reasons why launching dead granny dust into space is a pretty daft idea, but worries about unbalancing the earth's orbit or running out of carbon wouldn't be among them.
If you took all the people in the world and packed them into a box, like sardines, without cremating, that box would have to be about 3/4 mile per side.
That's it. All of humanity. All of humanity's mass. Poof it out into space and the earth wouldn't so much as bobble, or care.
KFG
Re:Only so much carbon...
by
brucmack
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It doesn't gain anything, it's a business. It's not like they are a group of researchers who have concluded that space 'burial' is better than land burial. They're just there to cater to relatively well-off people who either just like the idea of being a celestial body or are somehow religious and think that they are being 'buried' closer to god.
As for the mass on earth question, I wouldn't think the mass we've shot into space is anything to worry about. The earth is big and we aren't to the point where we can cheaply send tons of stuff into space. Even if everyone on earth were to be 'buried' there, it wouldn't cause any significant impact.
As an aside, what's with calling it a space burial anyway? I guess it's better on the marketing than just saying they'll shoot your lifeless body into nothingness where you'll cook on one side and freeze on the other.
Re:Only so much carbon...
by
whereiswaldo
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· Score: 4, Funny
The amount of mass being launched is measured in the hundreds of kilograms per year.
The amount of mass falling onto the earth from space is measured in the hundreds of tons per day.
What sorts of stuff are we launching and what sorts of stuff is falling onto the Earth? Maybe we're trading titanium for sand. Not that I think we have to worry - just a thought.
Still, maybe launching yourself into space could prevent you from being brought back to life someday. Then again, maybe you'd be brought back to life to fight some losing battle against aliens...;)
The decay bateria are hungry!
by
orthogonal
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Science seems convinced that in the early universe, only the elements with the lowest atomic weight -- hydrogen, helium, perhaps a few others -- existed.
Denser elements come into being for millions of years, until the very oldest stars first burnt out, then re-ignited by burning heavy elements, until finally bursting in novas and flinging heavier elements out into the universe.
After many many such novas, eventually enough of these heavier elements were produced to coalesce and form our sun and its planets. One of the heavier elements -- carbon, some 12 times heavier than fundamental element hydrogen -- conveniently arranges itself into the benzene rings of six atoms that are the scaffold for all Earthly life. It is because of this that Carl Sagan said that we were all made of star-stuff.
And after all that work of billions of years to collect heavy elements here on Earth, you want to just throw away all that
Read the small print, they send a "symbolic portion" of the cremated body, that could be one speck of the ash, that way you can send up an unlimited number of bodies in one go, sounds like a license to print money to me!
Another rip off is the name a star after you, listed at the bottom as part of the cheaper option, I have researched this name a star after you after hearing it on the radio and thinking about naming one after my girlfriend (she is into cosmology) but after researching it I discovered that all the people do is write the name down in a book that the company has, but the company has no right to name the star (only the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has the right to officially name celestial objects), so all you get is an expensive piece of paper ($50 and up) and here they are charging $300 bucks for that a digital broadcast!!
Tom: No, actually, Helping Children Through Research And Development is the acronym, Mike. It stands for: Hi, Everyone, Let's Pitch In 'N' Get Cracking Here In Louisiana Doing Right, Eh? Now Then, Hateful, Rich, Overbearing Ugly Guys Hurt Royally Every Time Someone Eats A Radish, Carrot, Hors d'oeuvre, And Never Does Dishes. Eventually, Victor Eats Lunch Over Peoria Mit Ein Neuesberger Tod.
.
I'll beat that price!
by
Simonetta
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· Score: 5, Insightful
For only $10,000 US (deposited in my Swiss bank account before your transistion to the next world), I will...
receive your ashes from the cremation facility,
and...
Give you a multi-colored ink-jet printed certificate that your ashes will be on the next space-shuttle flight and scattered into low-earth orbit. Where they will cause millions of tiny little twinkles that commemorate your life...
and...
Make sure that your ashes (in real life) don't make a big mess in the parking lot behind my apartment.
Burn on the Sun?
by
FuzzyFurB
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· Score: 5, Informative
Technically if you wait long enough your body will burn on the sun. It is common knowledge that the sun is slowly increasing in size and will eventually (all be it in a LONG time from now) envelope the Earth. If you cryogenically freeze yourself your body won't be destroyed until that day comes. Why pay the extra $ to make it happen now?:)
-- Will Stokes
Album Shaper
http://albumshaper.sf.net
How do you decompose in space?
by
read-only
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Anybody know how the human body decays in space?
Sorry for the gruesome question, but I'm curious.
Re:How do you decompose in space?
by
El_Ge_Ex
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Anybody know how the human body decays in space?
Actually, the decompression would get you before you had the change to find out. You bones would hold up and maybe some of your muscles. Your other organs wouldn't be so lucky though.
But hey, at least that part of you that somehow stays together will stay intact for the long haul. The cold of space would freeze it pretty quickly.
-B
Re:Only so much carbon...
by
Yorrike
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· Score: 5, Funny
True as that may be, people are getting fatter...
Say a group of zombies, or ninjas, or a killer virus that turned people into zombie ninjas, caused a good 5 billion people to die. Sure, these guys would have a booming business, but at 70Kg for each corpse, that's 350,000,000,000Kg (350 billion), which would require a millennium to replaces with space dust.
And besides, if you're ejecting all those kadavas into space, you're just asking the aforementioned virus to evolve, giving rise to a hideous race of mutant space zombie-ninjas.
Zombies need to eat too.
--
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Re:Only so much carbon...
by
borgboy
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· Score: 4, Informative
okay...by your reasoning: 1 person is 10 cubic feet of space (5x2x1) there are 6E9 people in the world 10 cuft/person x 6E9 people = 6E10 cuft
a box, 3/4 mile cube, holds 3960x3960x3960 cuft... that comes to 6.2E10 cubic feet.
or, in laymans terms, enough.
Original poster was correct, by your own figures. By his, he's at worst rather generous with the box.
-- meh.
Gene Roddenberry was already 'buried' in space
by
jebiester
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This was already done for Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek founder) in 1997. Just a shame the ashes weren't brought up in the Enterprise.
Life on other planets?...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
Years from now, i can see a space rover, digging up bodies on venus thinking "holy god, there was life here once"...
Re:Cemeteries are landfills
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kirkjobsluder
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· Score: 4, Informative
This is true, a lot of the really old cemetaries in Europe reuse graves ever few generations. The United States has not been around quite long enough to require charnel houses (where bones are stacked to make way for new graves) except in New Orleans where the the previous occupant was pushed to the back of the crypt.
Just Drop Into the Sun from Sail Ship
by
Mad+Man
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, flying straight the sun is very difficult.
If you are pushed a hair off course, your remains will go into orbit around the sun, or be blown outward by the solar winds.
Even if you aim precisely at the sun, the ever increasing pressure of the solar discharge will tend to push you off course and away.
So don't push the body into the sun from orbit.
Do it from a solar sail craft that is hovering over the sun (from a point where light pressure is balanced between gravitational pull), and just drop the body in.
As far as I know, the idea belongs to Bob L. Forward. That's how one of the characters is "buried" at the end of his novel Flight of the Dragonfly (which was later re-published in bloated form as Rocheworld; get the original).
Since the light sail craft was not in orbit, there was no forward component of motion. Thus, when released from the craft, the body was not in orbit either. The only force acting on the body was the gravitational pull of the star.
I prefer this Sweedish method
by
WormholeFiend
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· Score: 5, Interesting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3473103.stm
Swedes offer freeze-dry burials The environmentally-conscientious could soon ensure they don't end up polluting the earth after they die, thanks to a company in Sweden. Concerns about the environmental impact of embalming fluids or cremation have led Promessa Organic to come up with a chilling alternative.
Their method involves freeze-drying the corpse in liquid nitrogen.
Sound vibrations then shatter the brittle remains into a powder that can be "returned to the ecological cycle".
Biologist and head of Promessa Organic Susanne Wiigh-Maesak said she hoped to promote environmental and existential awareness.
"Our ecological burial reduces environmental impact on some of our most important resources; our water, air and soil," she explains on her company website.
"At the same time it provides us with deeper insights regarding the ecological cycle, and greater understanding of and respect for life on earth."
Compost
After the freezing process, the odourless powdery remains are laid in a coffin made of corn starch and buried in a shallow grave.
Ms Wiigh-Maesak says the soil "turns the coffin and its contents into compost in about six months" which means relatives can then plant a bush or tree on the spot.
The method is based upon preserving the body in a biological form after death, while avoiding harmful embalming fluid Susanne Wiigh-Maesak, Promessa Organic
"The compost formed can then be taken up by the plant... The plant stands as a symbol of the person, and we understand where the body went," she said. Ms Wiigh-Maesak says she would very much like to become a white rhododendron.
The company has applied for a patent on her method in 35 countries.
Ms Wiigh-Maesak said the authorities in Joenkoeping, 328 km (204 miles) south-west of Stockholm, were ready to start operating its first freeze-drying facility in the next couple of years.
The head of cemetery administration in Joenkoeping said younger people were keen on the idea as "green burials" are becoming popular in Sweden.
Actually, flying straight the sun is very difficult.
Yes, it is: to go into an orbit that will intersect the sun you have to kill nearly all your current velocity with respect to the sun. IIRC for the Earth that's about 25 miles per second (plus a bit extra to get you out of Earth's gravity well), which is more than three times as fast this "put your ashes in orbit" mission.
This is the part you just made up:
If you are pushed a hair off course, your remains will go into orbit around the sun, or be blown outward by the solar winds.
There is a reason why light-sail designs call for square miles of material thinner than paper: because unless you've got that much surface area to weight, neither sunlight nor solar wind will change your course very much.
Even if you aim precisely at the sun, the ever increasing pressure of the solar discharge will tend to push you off course and away.
That pressure will increase with the inverse square of your distance from the sun, as does the force of gravity pulling you towards the sun. If you were on course to begin with, you won't be blown off it, certainly not enough to miss a million mile wide target.
wait a few years
by
shawn(at)fsu
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· Score: 5, Funny
"I want to burn in the Sun (or at least the egomaniacal part of me.)"
You can do that for free, just wait about 5 billion years.
-- 500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Your easy answer is, alas, too easy.
by
rjh
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· Score: 5, Insightful
it DID cause the cold war
More accurately, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot. The Cold War was going to happen regardless of whether we dropped a nuke or Martha Stewart on Hiroshima. The US and the USSR were (are) both ideologically expansionist powers, in that each wanted to see its ideology adopted by the rest of the world. When two expansionist powers come into conflict, there's going to be a cold war and most likely followed by a very hot one. Unless, of course, both sides know that a hot war would be a literal hell on earth, thus giving both sides a strong incentive to not start a hot war.
Did we come close to nuclear war in the Cuba embargo? Damn straight. Why didn't we exchange nukes? Because both sides were reluctant to.
For the first time in the history of the world, we've invented a weapon which has not been used for over fifty years. That has never happened before.
I actually rather like the Bomb. It's a simple, one-question choice: are we as human beings morally developed enough to be allowed to continue existing?
It's a one-question exam, scored pass or fail. So far, humanity has made the right choice. I think that's rather hopeful, myself.
If any other country committed such an atrocity against another as the United States did to Japan, we would have World War 3
I see. So we could either kill 250,000 Japanese (and several thousand Korean slave workers who were in Hiroshima when the Bomb hit, and several thousands of other nationalities, too) in two attacks so terrible, so catastrophic, so Wrath of God, that the Japanese surrendered... or we could go forward with Operation Olympic and kill millions of Japanese and millions of Americans.
After the Nagasaki bomb hit, the Emperor was willing to surrender. Do you know what his aides' response to this was? They tried to murder him so that he wouldn't be able to surrender; and without an Emperor who could sign a surrender, it would've condemned Japan to decades of warfare. That's how hardcore, how serious, the Japanese generals, warmongers and militarists were: they wanted the world to end.
By nuking two cities, the United States forced a surrender.
Was dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. No matter what arguments you make for it being a war crime, there are powerful and compelling arguments that not dropping The Bomb would have been a greater crime. And no matter what arguments you make in defense of The Bomb, you cannot argue away 250,000-plus people wiped out in an instant, their shadows etched onto the sides of buildings.
I have no answers. I only appreciate the spectacular difficulty of the question. That you have found easy answers strongly suggests to me that you have no appreciation of the question.
In the end, humanity is advanced more by people who have no answers than by people who have answers without understanding the questions.
Mars landing
by
dialsoft
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I think that it would be great to be buried in space with a trajectory towards a planet that one day you will be either discovered there or your dna or whatever part of your decomposed body could contribute to the evolution of life on that planet in 22342342 million years.
Slashdot Mirror
PS: Please aim at the section of space that in the 23rd century will be off limits to all spacefarers, in which resides the Genesis planet. Please make sure to also provide good embalming and a capsule capable of shielding body from cosmic rays.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
As a lower cost option, these people allow you to broadcast a digital message which can contain any audio or picture format you want into space.
They call the service Ad Astra. I like the dobule meaning of the word "ad" in that name...
To much garbage in space? Man that would my point for being 'buried' in space... to become a potentially dangerous piece of space debris! It would be like coming back from the dead to strike fear in the hearts of the living!
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
Quoth the poster: "I want to burn in the Sun (or at least the egomaniacal part of me.)"
I know *exactly* how you feel.
I want you to burn in the Sun, too.
I want to burn in the Sun (or at least the egomaniacal part of me.)
According to my ex-wife I'm gonna burn in hell when I die.
This is what you give your geek on Valentine's Day. You may have to kill them first, but it's worth it.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
This is old news - Celestis handled my brother back in 2000.
www.eFax.com are spammers
We all will...eventually. You'll be dead anyway, so why does it matter if you get toasted in the months following your death rather than a few hundred million?
This seems awfully affordable for launching anything in to space. Even if it is cremated remains, I would have expectede that it would be more expensive. Their webpage claims they have two of these in orbit already though. So all I need to do is find $11k and then cremate myself...
Only $11,000? Thats pretty cheap, considering the cost of taking a pound of gear into orbit. How do they get human remains that light? Even when you cremate a body, significant bones and dust remain. What do they do, throw away most of it and just send up a little bit of each person on their sattelite? Cremated remains can weigh upwards of two to five pounds. I'm wondering if this is all a scam, considering the high cost of burial space in certain geographical areas. In some places, a burial plot can cost even more than $11,000.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
No problem. Just get buried here on earth. Eventually, your wish will be granted. And since you're dead, the wait will be quite bearable. :-)
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
The phrase that is used is being "buried in space". Quite obviously, one cannot be literally buried in space. What they do is cremate and eject the remains into stellar space.
I don't remember anyone saying Gene Roddenberry was buried in space....I wonder if he was the first person to voluntarily have his remains ejected into space.
...burn in Uranus.
LSD Guru Tim Leary, Gene Roddenberry, and 22 others had their remains shot up into orbit in a capsule in 1997. The capsule was supposed to remain in orbit for around 18 months, then burn up on reentry into the atmosphere, for a double cremation!
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
This would be a great way to test the Missle Defense System. I don't know about anyone else, but personally I wouldn't mind being put to rest in a big explosion at the cost to the U.S. taxpayer.
The amount of mass being launched is measured in the hundreds of kilograms per year.
The amount of mass falling onto the earth from space is measured in the hundreds of tons per day.
Do the math.
www.eFax.com are spammers
For those imagining yourself in a coffin in space, try again. Only 7 grams (less than 1/4 of an ounce) is sent up in the full version of their "Earthview" service, which involves a craft that projects the ashes out into "orbit" (not exactly one that can be tracked) while the craft itself vaporizes in the atmosphere. A discount version involves only one gram of ashes.
Other services mention only a "symbolic portion", and its questionable whether they even exist. The only non-"Earthview" activity was purchasing a capsule on a NASA mission that was headed to the moon. I presume their deep space service would be offered the same way...
Cemetaries don't last forever. They can be reused every few hundred years.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
So when Armageddon arrives and all those dead try to rise from their graves while orbiting some far-off celestial body, how's THAT gonna work? It's almost like these guys haven't thought this whole thing through very well.
Considering the earth accumulates 30 million kg of space dust each year, I don't think this will be a problem. (http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news19.html)
..I've always thought that space burials are one of the best ways we have a shot at 'meeting' alien races.
:-)
Yes, many of these coffin launches are going to get sucked up into solar gravity wells and burn up, but some are going to get caught in orbits around low-atmosphere bodies or other survivable situations.
My thinking behind this? the universe isnt *that* old compared to its predicted total lifespan; humankind may indeed be one of the 'first races'. By the time enough life-bearing planets produce that cycle, humanity may already be several hundred million years extinct. But putting our 'relics' (ie our corpses) out into the void, where they may survive fairly intact for far longer (assuming they have the sense to vacuum-pack our corpsicles) we stand a fair chance that something out in the distant future is going to find one of these human relics, and if they havent watched enough sci-fi, probably resurrect the human race from our DNA
[seriously, blasting your corpse into space probably has more value to it than any current cyrogenics program, as far as the odds of you being resurrected go, the cost of maintenance,[hopefuly none] and value to the human race (lets face it, most of the people going into alcor drums we probably dont want back!)
Certainly, I'd like to do this, on the condition that the launch params were sufficient to give me a good shot at escaping the sol system limits and not returning to ground as space-trash on one of our neighboring planets.
These guys are willing to pay up to $10,000,000 of your funeral expenses, provided you get your corpse up there yourself!
The earth's mass increases by tons a day, from the influx of space stuff. It doesn't really matter, as a percentage of the earth's mass the stuff that comes in and what we ship out is waaaaaay below the level of significant digits.
I could sit here half the night listing reasons why launching dead granny dust into space is a pretty daft idea, but worries about unbalancing the earth's orbit or running out of carbon wouldn't be among them.
If you took all the people in the world and packed them into a box, like sardines, without cremating, that box would have to be about 3/4 mile per side.
That's it. All of humanity. All of humanity's mass. Poof it out into space and the earth wouldn't so much as bobble, or care.
KFG
It doesn't gain anything, it's a business. It's not like they are a group of researchers who have concluded that space 'burial' is better than land burial. They're just there to cater to relatively well-off people who either just like the idea of being a celestial body or are somehow religious and think that they are being 'buried' closer to god.
As for the mass on earth question, I wouldn't think the mass we've shot into space is anything to worry about. The earth is big and we aren't to the point where we can cheaply send tons of stuff into space. Even if everyone on earth were to be 'buried' there, it wouldn't cause any significant impact.
As an aside, what's with calling it a space burial anyway? I guess it's better on the marketing than just saying they'll shoot your lifeless body into nothingness where you'll cook on one side and freeze on the other.
The amount of mass being launched is measured in the hundreds of kilograms per year.
;)
The amount of mass falling onto the earth from space is measured in the hundreds of tons per day.
What sorts of stuff are we launching and what sorts of stuff is falling onto the Earth? Maybe we're trading titanium for sand. Not that I think we have to worry - just a thought.
Still, maybe launching yourself into space could prevent you from being brought back to life someday. Then again, maybe you'd be brought back to life to fight some losing battle against aliens...
Denser elements come into being for millions of years, until the very oldest stars first burnt out, then re-ignited by burning heavy elements, until finally bursting in novas and flinging heavier elements out into the universe.
After many many such novas, eventually enough of these heavier elements were produced to coalesce and form our sun and its planets. One of the heavier elements -- carbon, some 12 times heavier than fundamental element hydrogen -- conveniently arranges itself into the benzene rings of six atoms that are the scaffold for all Earthly life. It is because of this that Carl Sagan said that we were all made of star-stuff.
And after all that work of billions of years to collect heavy elements here on Earth, you want to just throw away all that by shooting it into space?
Learn to recycle, fer cryin' out loud!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
(Note: all numbers pulled from Internet in the space of a few minutes. May be inaccurate.)
mass of Earth:
5.9742 x 10^24 kilograms. That's
5,974,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
mass of average person:
about 100 kilograms
number of bodies needed to change the Earth's weight by 1%:
597,420,000,000,000,000,000
Population of Earth:
about 6,000,000,000
Weight of Apollo 11:
about 30,000 kg
Number of Apollo 11's needed to change Earth's weight by 1%
1,991,400,000,000,000,000
In conclusion, the Earth is really big.
Well my granddad never touched alcohol, nor did he beat up on his wife and my family can go and pay their respects at his grave site at any time.
Reducing him and many others to the equal of garbage is disrespectful to say the least.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Read the small print, they send a "symbolic portion" of the cremated body, that could be one speck of the ash, that way you can send up an unlimited number of bodies in one go, sounds like a license to print money to me!
Another rip off is the name a star after you, listed at the bottom as part of the cheaper option, I have researched this name a star after you after hearing it on the radio and thinking about naming one after my girlfriend (she is into cosmology) but after researching it I discovered that all the people do is write the name down in a book that the company has, but the company has no right to name the star (only the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has the right to officially name celestial objects), so all you get is an expensive piece of paper ($50 and up) and here they are charging $300 bucks for that a digital broadcast!!
Tom: No, actually, Helping Children Through Research And Development is the acronym, Mike. It stands for: Hi, Everyone, Let's Pitch In 'N' Get Cracking Here In Louisiana Doing Right, Eh? Now Then, Hateful, Rich, Overbearing Ugly Guys Hurt Royally Every Time Someone Eats A Radish, Carrot, Hors d'oeuvre, And Never Does Dishes. Eventually, Victor Eats Lunch Over Peoria Mit Ein Neuesberger Tod. .
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
For only $10,000 US (deposited in my Swiss bank account before your transistion to the next world), I will...
receive your ashes from the cremation facility,
and...
Give you a multi-colored ink-jet printed certificate that your ashes will be on the next space-shuttle flight and scattered into low-earth orbit. Where they will cause millions of tiny little twinkles that commemorate your life...
and...
Make sure that your ashes (in real life) don't make a big mess in the parking lot behind my apartment.
Technically if you wait long enough your body will burn on the sun. It is common knowledge that the sun is slowly increasing in size and will eventually (all be it in a LONG time from now) envelope the Earth. If you cryogenically freeze yourself your body won't be destroyed until that day comes. Why pay the extra $ to make it happen now? :)
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
Anybody know how the human body decays in space?
Sorry for the gruesome question, but I'm curious.
Say a group of zombies, or ninjas, or a killer virus that turned people into zombie ninjas, caused a good 5 billion people to die. Sure, these guys would have a booming business, but at 70Kg for each corpse, that's 350,000,000,000Kg (350 billion), which would require a millennium to replaces with space dust.
And besides, if you're ejecting all those kadavas into space, you're just asking the aforementioned virus to evolve, giving rise to a hideous race of mutant space zombie-ninjas.
Zombies need to eat too.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
okay...by your reasoning:
1 person is 10 cubic feet of space (5x2x1)
there are 6E9 people in the world
10 cuft/person x 6E9 people = 6E10 cuft
a box, 3/4 mile cube, holds 3960x3960x3960 cuft...
that comes to 6.2E10 cubic feet.
or, in laymans terms, enough.
Original poster was correct, by your own figures. By his, he's at worst rather generous with the box.
meh.
There's a old CNN article on it here
Years from now, i can see a space rover, digging up bodies on venus thinking "holy god, there was life here once"...
This is true, a lot of the really old cemetaries in Europe reuse graves ever few generations. The United States has not been around quite long enough to require charnel houses (where bones are stacked to make way for new graves) except in New Orleans where the the previous occupant was pushed to the back of the crypt.
So don't push the body into the sun from orbit.
Do it from a solar sail craft that is hovering over the sun (from a point where light pressure is balanced between gravitational pull), and just drop the body in.
As far as I know, the idea belongs to Bob L. Forward. That's how one of the characters is "buried" at the end of his novel Flight of the Dragonfly (which was later re-published in bloated form as Rocheworld; get the original).
Since the light sail craft was not in orbit, there was no forward component of motion. Thus, when released from the craft, the body was not in orbit either. The only force acting on the body was the gravitational pull of the star.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3473103.stm
Swedes offer freeze-dry burials
The environmentally-conscientious could soon ensure they don't end up polluting the earth after they die, thanks to a company in Sweden.
Concerns about the environmental impact of embalming fluids or cremation have led Promessa Organic to come up with a chilling alternative.
Their method involves freeze-drying the corpse in liquid nitrogen.
Sound vibrations then shatter the brittle remains into a powder that can be "returned to the ecological cycle".
Biologist and head of Promessa Organic Susanne Wiigh-Maesak said she hoped to promote environmental and existential awareness.
"Our ecological burial reduces environmental impact on some of our most important resources; our water, air and soil," she explains on her company website.
"At the same time it provides us with deeper insights regarding the ecological cycle, and greater understanding of and respect for life on earth."
Compost
After the freezing process, the odourless powdery remains are laid in a coffin made of corn starch and buried in a shallow grave.
Ms Wiigh-Maesak says the soil "turns the coffin and its contents into compost in about six months" which means relatives can then plant a bush or tree on the spot.
The method is based upon preserving the body in a biological form after death, while avoiding harmful embalming fluid
Susanne Wiigh-Maesak,
Promessa Organic
"The compost formed can then be taken up by the plant... The plant stands as a symbol of the person, and we understand where the body went," she said.
Ms Wiigh-Maesak says she would very much like to become a white rhododendron.
The company has applied for a patent on her method in 35 countries.
Ms Wiigh-Maesak said the authorities in Joenkoeping, 328 km (204 miles) south-west of Stockholm, were ready to start operating its first freeze-drying facility in the next couple of years.
The head of cemetery administration in Joenkoeping said younger people were keen on the idea as "green burials" are becoming popular in Sweden.
This is the part you got right:
Actually, flying straight the sun is very difficult.
Yes, it is: to go into an orbit that will intersect the sun you have to kill nearly all your current velocity with respect to the sun. IIRC for the Earth that's about 25 miles per second (plus a bit extra to get you out of Earth's gravity well), which is more than three times as fast this "put your ashes in orbit" mission.
This is the part you just made up:
If you are pushed a hair off course, your remains will go into orbit around the sun, or be blown outward by the solar winds.
There is a reason why light-sail designs call for square miles of material thinner than paper: because unless you've got that much surface area to weight, neither sunlight nor solar wind will change your course very much.
Even if you aim precisely at the sun, the ever increasing pressure of the solar discharge will tend to push you off course and away.
That pressure will increase with the inverse square of your distance from the sun, as does the force of gravity pulling you towards the sun. If you were on course to begin with, you won't be blown off it, certainly not enough to miss a million mile wide target.
"I want to burn in the Sun (or at least the egomaniacal part of me.)"
You can do that for free, just wait about 5 billion years.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
it DID cause the cold war
More accurately, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot. The Cold War was going to happen regardless of whether we dropped a nuke or Martha Stewart on Hiroshima. The US and the USSR were (are) both ideologically expansionist powers, in that each wanted to see its ideology adopted by the rest of the world. When two expansionist powers come into conflict, there's going to be a cold war and most likely followed by a very hot one. Unless, of course, both sides know that a hot war would be a literal hell on earth, thus giving both sides a strong incentive to not start a hot war.
Did we come close to nuclear war in the Cuba embargo? Damn straight. Why didn't we exchange nukes? Because both sides were reluctant to.
For the first time in the history of the world, we've invented a weapon which has not been used for over fifty years. That has never happened before.
I actually rather like the Bomb. It's a simple, one-question choice: are we as human beings morally developed enough to be allowed to continue existing?
It's a one-question exam, scored pass or fail. So far, humanity has made the right choice. I think that's rather hopeful, myself.
If any other country committed such an atrocity against another as the United States did to Japan, we would have World War 3
I see. So we could either kill 250,000 Japanese (and several thousand Korean slave workers who were in Hiroshima when the Bomb hit, and several thousands of other nationalities, too) in two attacks so terrible, so catastrophic, so Wrath of God, that the Japanese surrendered... or we could go forward with Operation Olympic and kill millions of Japanese and millions of Americans.
After the Nagasaki bomb hit, the Emperor was willing to surrender. Do you know what his aides' response to this was? They tried to murder him so that he wouldn't be able to surrender; and without an Emperor who could sign a surrender, it would've condemned Japan to decades of warfare. That's how hardcore, how serious, the Japanese generals, warmongers and militarists were: they wanted the world to end.
By nuking two cities, the United States forced a surrender.
Was dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. No matter what arguments you make for it being a war crime, there are powerful and compelling arguments that not dropping The Bomb would have been a greater crime. And no matter what arguments you make in defense of The Bomb, you cannot argue away 250,000-plus people wiped out in an instant, their shadows etched onto the sides of buildings.
I have no answers. I only appreciate the spectacular difficulty of the question. That you have found easy answers strongly suggests to me that you have no appreciation of the question.
In the end, humanity is advanced more by people who have no answers than by people who have answers without understanding the questions.
I think that it would be great to be buried in space with a trajectory towards a planet that one day you will be either discovered there or your dna or whatever part of your decomposed body could contribute to the evolution of life on that planet in 22342342 million years.
rock on