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    21st Century Ideas: Making use of the dead

    The bodies of the dead could be used to create energy or food

    Started by: Dr. Strangelove Raves:2

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    Thanks to the pandemic, we have an over-abundance of corpses on our hands. Face it, we need the real estate to grow food, so we can't bury them. They're diseased. it would be prudent to quickly find a way of sterilizing these bodies and turning them into potential food sources. That failing, we can certainly incinerate them, thus using them to create energy.

    Burial does have the advantage of returning the nutrients in the corpses to the soil, improving its fertility, albeit with a time delay.

    Bodies don't burn so great, so it would be difficult to use the dead as fuel, at least directly. As for food, I don't think that the logistical problems and ethical dilemmas would be easy to overcome. I personally would have no problem eating food the ultimate source of which was a human body, but it may be difficult to get people to clean the bodies, butcher them, and cook them. That doesn't even touch the problems of transporting piles of corpses, many of them possibly infected with ReDS, across the country. Most would also consider eating a dead body to be morally wrong, and besides, the gutteral reaction to "This used to be a person" would be hard to overcome. In a way, bodies buried in the ground without a coffin are used as food and energy anyway, because crop cultivation on a full "graveyard" with corpses under ground would basically be using the bodies as fertilizer. That is converting them into food and fuel. Plus, people could still have respectful burial services similar to the ones they have now, only after a plot was filled, we would just convert it into farmland.

    Eating the dead is rather ghoulish and somewhat dangerous for the consumer especially if the food is diseased. There are better ways of disposing of corpses without having to resort to consuming them. Rendering the body fat for biodiesel is one method. As for the rest well we will just have to innovate.

    Eating the dead or making use of the dead is an interesting idea at first, but there are so many problems not just with ReDS, but the other problems that have plagued other cannibalistic societies, like brain diseases, cooking problems, and the quick decomposition of so much flesh. It wouldn't work out, sorry Dr.

    Maybe we could take advantage of that quick decomposition, QuietDoe. If there was some way to be sure ReDS would not pass through the soil, we could easily cut the bodies into small pieces and mix them with the dirt to create rich soil for growing food.

    That's very possible, but after that, i don't know, i still wonder about the ethics there. given the importance though, the need, it's possible

    I don't know that Cannibalism is a solution. For short term immediate survival it may be your own option, but diseased and rotting corpses will serve no purpose but to make you violently ill. Even cannibalistic societies reserve the act for ceremony, it isn't a source of sustenance.

    I'm going to agree with user Ryan Forbes on this one, adding that it just seems like it might lower morale / hurt humans emotionally more than the positive benefits. I think that in any situation, cannibalism should be reserved as a Donner Party-esque "last resort"- if there is absolutely, positively nothing else. While we're still able to brainstorm productively, I think that there are more positive solutions we could consider far before resorting to something like cannibalism.

    Accelerated compost sites involving irradiation of bodies then mechanical breakdown. After thorough breakdown, the compost will enrich the soil with nitrogen and phosphorus. Cultural attitudes of honoring our dead in spirit are reinforced with memorial ceremonies with less attachment on the physical remains

    The honoring of the dead will come secondary when the threat of decreased food productivity and the increasing threat that unsanitary disposal of bodies could provide. While there is an ethical dilemma, using the bodies as biofuel would be incredibly effective. With such a dire situation, I'm sure humanity at large will begin to develop the belief that returning to the soil to nourish Mother Nature will be a great way to have your body disposed of. Well, there would be quite the resistance from Christian groups.

    Actually bodies burn very well above a certain temperature. An incinerator, when fueled up at the start of the day, can actually provide heat (and not require much gas to sustain the burning process) by shovelling in addictional corpses. Not entering enough fuel WILL produce a heck of a nasty black smoke, but that's beside the issue.

    Plus do you people actually believe for a second that in places where you live, in 2019 there will be largescale DYING from starvation? isn't that a little over the top? Aren't you all visualising this a little hysterically cinematic? Personally I do not think there will be much need for victory gardens at all, let alone actually people dying of starvation at any level (even when we had airborne Aids). I do not have the same optimism when it comes to overpopulated third world countries.

    The best way to dispose of dead bodies and make use of them is to liquify them (literally - blend them to a pulp), sterilize the pup in a high pressure cooker and (and yes this is a concept that will cause largescale psychological trauma to people when applied at any level) drive trucks with pulped people along victory gardens and use it as fertillizer. Personally I dont believe for a SECOND people will do this - not even in africa, during the worst famines has something like this level of cynical emotional detachment occurred. Personally I think if people will die faster than can be handled, they'll be stuck in sealed coffins and piled in warehouses, probably for years, until someone comes up with an idea. That idea would probably be something totally genius (NOT) like dumping the coffins in the sea where they sank into a big useless, unceremonial pile a mile deep.

    Final note - most people having died right now, around 2008, are technically classified as toxic waste, due to the rather unsubtle lifestyles of most people and the high use of medication. I would NOT recommend eating people meat more than once or twice a month. It's unhealthy stuff, especially when the people were old.

    @Ruud We anticipate late scale human die offs because war, disease, Starvation and infrastructure collapse all go hand in hand. Dealing with the disposal of human remains will be a monumental task. I personally think that the death toll will be around 4 billion. Just getting the remains to mass burial sites will be a huge challenge.

    Idiotic. This a plain disastrous statement, with no sense of context or implications. Many people do not personally like dying any much. To assume I am going to idly sit by and be part of your bloody SOCIOPATHIC statistic is unacceptable. If you say, half of all humans will die, then anticipate many humans not agreeing. I will go pretty far personally in resisting such a process, but there are people you can trust on going all the way. And in this equasion "all the way" means - if I am to die, everybody is to die. ....... If you really think people will go extinct in an orderly fashion, queued up in front of corpse depots, think again. People will fight like crazed lions to live, even for another minute. Give them a chance and they'll fight tooth and claw to take it. Now that was a containable process, the death of a civilisation, up to the middle ages. If romans or eastern islanders died in droves it had very few implications. But what if russians or israeli or saudi start dying? Especially if they are eschatologically inclined, they'll start using nuclear weapons. A mass-die off scenario in my book EQUATES a fullblown nuclear inferno. If that happens, only a few million survive, in a world that is categorically unacceptable to live in. Your expectations lead to a future that, "though expedient in your detached alienated analytical paradigm" is unacceptable by any definition I cherish.

    Although tansporting the human meat would not really pose an issue (it would be the same as a cow, only less weight) it is along the line of traveling infections such as the ReDS pandemic that worries me. in order to contain this disease you must creat a way to ensure the infection cannot be moved from a dead corpse to a living human by ingesting it. Although ReDS is a repiratory infection it can still be transmitted by the blood of the corpse. On the other hand this dilemma is not ppractical, you speak of the unnessicary room that is taken up by bburying the bodies, well that dilemma is easily solved by dismissing the option of a catholic style burial and instead leave open endedness for a Nazarene style memorial with cremation as the end result for the body. Since Bodies do not burn easily theyy would not create a usible fuel source and containment of the ReDS infection is one of the super threats i find that regular cremation and disposal of the aashes would be the only viable solution to this conundrum.

    This is biohazardous/infectious waste you people are talking about here. As far as transport, most of this will need to be handeled by the DOT. As far using them for direct food, absurd. Forget the social implications, the health risks alone are too high. Remember how mad cow disease was started. By doing this you would only bring new diseases on us all. As for using bodies as fertilizer or fuel, unless the governement was highly envolved and did all of this secretly (very Soylent Green like), the public, in my personal opinion, would never go for it. In which case you could add the new superthreat of mass riots.

    Soylent Green is People -- PEEEOOOPLLEE!!!




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