Memories of the 28th Century

I don’t know when humans started doing something special to the bodies of dead companions, relatives, and friends, but it seems to have been several tens of thousands of years or longer. Apparently there isn’t a lot of information about the origin of funereal customs, but they go back more than 60,000 years. The remains of some Neanderthals have been found buried with flowers and dyes that suggest the idea of sending them to some afterlife. Burial would have kept them from being eaten by scavengers, and preventing the consumption might have been the original reason for burial. It is also possible that they were just doing what they did with food scraps to keep scavengers away.

These days burial is probably the most common way to handle the dead, but cremation is also in use, and in Zarathustrianism bodies are fed to the birds and bury the bones that remain. In many places it has become common to embalm the body to preserve it from decomposition; this has been going on for thousands of years with varying degrees of popularity. Here in the U.S.A. embalming was required by law in most places for the last hundred years, but I understand that “green” burial is again being allowed.

That is quite a change. Until recently in many places bodies had to be embalmed and there had to be a concrete burial vault, and the grave had to be at least six feet deep. That combination meant that a body would be preserved for many years, but a “green” burial means that the worms can get their traditional food, and the body would be returned to the soil within decades.

Something has to be done with the bodies, and the custom of burial is time honored, but eventually we will run out of land for it, but that will take a long time. Another method that would trap potential pollutants and return many soil nutrients would be petrification. We usually think of petrification as a slow geologic process that makes fossils, but it doesn't take a very long time, and the time could be accelerated by mechanical means. As an example, you may have seen tree trunks in flooded areas where the trees dies and stood in place without rotting and falling down. Such tree trunks usually are petrified at least to some extent. An acquaintance had a number of such trees and cut them down and sent logs to the sawmill; the mill quickly determined that they were too mineralized for convenient sawing; the blades threw many sparks and became dull quickly.

You may have read of bodies found in peat bogs that had been there for a few thousand years. Those bodies were also partly fossilized. We could encourage faster petrification by using specially designed tanks and water that was slightly acidic and contained dissolved minerals.

I bring this up, because after I will die, I want my body to be petrified and for the resulting fossil to be displayed as a statue. How long it would take is unknown, but those trees in flooded areas are largely petrified after a few decades, and the pickled petrified bodies in bogs are a few thousand years old, and apparently they are beyond rotting. Slowly pumping a solution through the body should enable petrification within less than a hundred years. We could start the preservation process with salting and add dissolved silica and other minerals when the body has stabilized. Apparently the best success has been with pyrites, see linked wiki article.

Petrification after death would serve a few purposes. It would memorialize the person for a long time, but it would not take land out of other uses, because the petrified body would not be left in a hole in the ground. And it wouldn't take all the fuel that cremation requires. It would require some energy to pump the solution around until petrification was complete, but the facility would be more like an industrial plant, and the family could place the petrified bodies in a statuary garden.

Although it has been claimed that the process was developed a few hundred years ago, the details were lost, so someone would have to recreate the process, but it should be fairly quick, because there are methods for fireproofing wood that are similar. This system would be better than embalming, and the Ancient Egyptians would have loved it also, because they could have used their dead Pharaohs as statues. This is the funereal method that humans have been seeking for tens of thousands of years.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrifaction