Originally Posted by Erth
In part this research comes from a place where I'm looking at societal reaction to technologies.This, in my mind, is the single most extreme thing I can think of in terms of existing social taboo vs. environmental benefit, which makes it an interesting path of study... Despite it not currently being a requirement or anything, at a certain point we're going to have to address it. Cemeteries get full, and you can't spare the land in cities. The sooner it's addressed the sooner you can implement the benefits. Or rather, the sooner you address the social taboos surrounding it, the sooner you can start making the changes necessary for the human race to continue living as we currently do.
I would think the more practical and generally acceptable thing would be, instead of us getting comfortable with this taboo, we would instead develop 'non-taboo' tech that makes the cremation process (or just human corpse processing in general) greener. Quick google tells me this is already being looked into - Aquamation (water cremation) does a 10x better job at not impacting the environment (versus typical cremation), and the resulting liquid can also be used as fertilizer. For some reason, aquamation hits me less viscerally than corpse composting - I'm more immedietely comfortable with the former. Aside from aquamation, there's other methods, including just making the current cremation process less environmentally damaging.
Recomposting for soil rejuvination definitely sounds like an elegant idea (even solves two problems at once), but it's on-the-nose. Smells crappy. Too much to get past. That's not to say that we oughn't try and develop ways to derive something positive from one's death, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone who'd try this (Washington State, this year, legalized a form of limited recomposting). I just don't see it catching on. I've my faith in our ever-increasing rate of technological development getting us through this (excepting some civilizational collapse that sets us back hundreds of years).
Last edited by Ele; Oct 10, 2020 at 12:10 AM.