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Man Patents Self-Burying Coffin
disco_tracy writes "A California inventor has filed a patent for a coffin that screws into the ground vertically. The reason? It greatly reduces excavation labor and burial costs, decreases land use, and opens up more space for burials in unused areas of a cemetery. Writer Clark Boyd also lists 5 other unconventional burial options, including lye, ecopods, GPS devices that track bodies buried without headstones, cryogenics and — my favorite — getting buried in the sky."
make a structure OUT OF dead people, not over them. not necessarily mausoleums and cenotaphs, but houses for the living too, or town squares: you become, literally, part of the community you helped to build/ that you loved
ok, it's a little creepy
"dad, where's grandpa?"
"in the third load bearing column by the kitchen"
at the very least, it would be a good backstory for a horror movie, or ghostbusters iii
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why go to all that negative bother? A good old fashioned gator pit suits me. Not only is burial not even an issue but the hides from the happy, and well fed gators make lovely luggage. The rest of the gators harvested could be used as hog feed.
"At some point this whole "burying" thing needs to go. It is not an infinitely sustainable model to follow."
According to the Cremation Association, burying is already dying out, with over 1/3rd of deaths currently resulting in cremations and they're projecting over 50% by 2025.
However I see nothing wrong with burying the dead, it's deeply rooted in many cultures and religions and to say someone is wrong for burying their dead is equal to telling them their culture is wrong.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Reminds me of my aunt who took her cousin's ashes across the country (US) to be buried in her home town. She kept the ashes in the glove compartment of her car. And forgot about them. Until a year later when she was planning her next trip out west she suddenly remembered her promise, and the ashes that were still in the glove compartment. So she rushed out to the cemetery (or wherever) with a video camera and quick held a funeral with her brothers and sisters so she would have evidence that she did, indeed, bury the ashes. Then she quick packed the video and headed out on her trip to meet the very family that had made the request to begin with. Now the only question I have is, was the video date-stamped, and did anyone notice? I don't think I will ever know.
Certain aspects of certain cultures are, lacking better words, wrong; slavery, arranged marriage, blood sacrifice to name a few. Burial may not be one of them, but it is, as GP points out, not infinitely scalable. There is a limited amount of space on our planet. Heck, there's even a limited amount of coal atoms from which to produce new people. At some point, you'll simply have to accept that the bodies of dead need to be recycled.
Whether this scaling problem will actually cause real problems before we infect other planets (and thus buy ourselves more space and, potentially, coal atoms) remains to be seen.
I know someone whom has in their will to have a viking funeral. Payout of the estate is contingent on this. Also in the estate is an escrow fund to pay the fines for and purchase the following:
desecration of a corpse
open air cremation of a corpse
lighting a boat on fire in a waterway
the boat
the fuel to place in the boat
the cost of a accurate archer
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump