h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's bad enough that we bury our dead in large tracts of land (memorial gardens, cemeteries, whatever), but to waste resources keeping a person in a state of suspended animation...

That's just selfish in the extreme.

Death followed by cremation is the way to go. No costly perpetual care provisions for a cemetery or cyrogenic lab.

The world has enough resource limitations without things like this.

Besides, is it really 'living' to be brought back 100 years in the future to be alone with all your loved ones dead and gone?

that's the spirit!

when i die i'd like a tree to be planted on my grave (no stone), preferrably something that will grow very big. i hope that i will have no regrets, and no need for a "second chance".

and i want my friends and relations to have a really big party.

i wish people would stop bellyaching about dying and eternal youth and such. do the best with what you've got and that's better than anything else. it won't get any better in a time which you'll understand even less than your own.

i hope i'd say the same thing if i were dying...

I think cemeteries are alright, also more ecological than cremation. As long as they don´t bury people in coffins of metal or cheramics. But some religions have cemeteries that have to be there forever, now that is just stupid. And where are the atheist cemeteries?

I've never heard of an atheist cemetary. Atheists tend to prefer cremation. It's cheaper, and you're reduced to dust very efficiently. The old fashioned method where the bugs and such have to eat through the coffin to get to you takes a lot longer, although it is arguably good for the bugs and plants.

Even wood coffins can be problematic, as they are often covered with chemical polish and the wood may have been treated. Unfinished wood coffins aren't the norm the way they used to be.

To me, the most wasteful burial is the family crypt, where stone walls are placed around an ever changing selection of dead bodies in various states of rot. It's both macabre and tremendously useless.

I like to imagine that someday, all human parts will be repairable and the galaxy will be open to us. In such a scenario, human beings will be the most important resource in our natural desire to explore and colonize new worlds. Ironically, some of those cryogenically frozen people might come in useful then.

Of course, you still have to justify the resources to keep them frozen now. And you can't, really. It's nonsensical to spend thousands to preserve your rotting body for centuries when people are routinely starving to death.

Funny of you to mention people as a valueable resorce. People frozen and brought back to pilot starships to explore new galaxies is a good idea by me. People who have no family and friends and are brought back would be expendable for the purpose of exploration, you may not kill them but they would be going and getting cut off from the rest of the human race to expand the known universe. They would have no ties to regret other than maybe leaving the earth. Also great minds if perserved and broght back could in the long run think up new and great things. If you are interested in this type of stuff the book "A World Out Of Time" by Larry Niven might be on order, it covers a lot of the aspects of having a long, and extended life, everything involved with the cryogenic storage and the ethics of bringing a person back from stasis.

Personally I wouldnt mind going forward in time through stasis either with or without my freinds and family just to see what we as a race accoplish, and if I never came back, well I guess I would find out when I got to the afterlife. I think a corpsicle would only have a delayed entry into afterlife.

There are ways you could use the earth to power the stasis chambers, using minimum man-made energy. If you had to freeze a body all you would have to do it put it in antarctica with a temperature regulator that kept it at a constant temperature and whatnot. Anyway, I wonder exactly how this contraption would work...

Antarcticas isn´t cold enough. You´d have to put the body into space, at least if you want the kind of temperatures they usually need.

And about it being a wast of resources, it´s their money so they can do what they want with them. I´m sure many starving africans also think buying a computer is a waste of resources.

Antarctica is pretty cold, therefore dropping the temperature from what it is there (say -20) to absolute zero would be easyer than from 100 degrees (which it is in Arizona) Of corse they are using liquid nitrogen for the stasis process... Say... sounds like a new video game... the freezers brake down and the people turn into zombies from some weird nuclear reaction and go on a rampage and you have to stop them from getting out into downtown Pheonix! MY IDEA... HA HA HA!!! (if you want to use it give me a cut!!!

Speaking of freezing and phoenix. I just watched Demolition man. It was obvious they all had symbolic names. but I just couldn´t figure out what Dr Cocteau was supposed to be.

I dunno... Interesting though... Another book that involves reanimation is 3001 Oddesy 3... Frank is taken into the hold of a comet mining ship and brought back to earth in 3001 (1000 years after he died) and re-animated....