When dying comes under the sway of Blessed Gaia:
In Agamemnon, the father of tragedy, Aeschylus, noted that “death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.” If he could have seen where things were going, he might not have drawn such a clear distinction.
8 comments:
Well, all we need now are a few attractive hostesses in skintight catsuits to run the thing, and we have Vonnegut's "Welcome the the Monkey House".
Or, for that matter, the original series "Star Trek" episode "A Taste of Armageddon". (Kirk speaking to Anan 7; "You've made war neat, and painless- so neat and painless you've had no reason to stop it.")
Making death neat, clean, and "good for Gaia" is only a praiseworthy intention if you do not consider the mentality of those who desire it to be so. In doing so, you remove what might be the only thing restraining them from cutting loose in full-on "Death to the Humans" mode.
They now have a disposal method which they could argue makes disposing of the rest of us not merely a necessary task, but part of the sacred duty to their deity.
And it works just as well on the living as on the dead.
My guess is that the deep-ecos' are having self-control problems right. Trying to resist the urge to break out in maniacal laughter.
cheers
eon
I wouldn't go quite so far, eon. When you have a non-trivially sized society, sanitary disposal of the dead becomes an issue. You can't just leave them out for the raccoons or build pyramids on top of them. Where cemetery space is limited, cremation has traditionally been an option. I would say that this is an invention in that vein, and that this guy's ingenuity simply runs in that direction (for reasons about whose psychology I do not wish to speculate). Someone's got the patent on some new thermostat for a cremation oven, someone's got the patent on this. As for its alleged greenness being a selling point, well, it's how everything is sold these days. If someone could hawk it as renewable biofuel, I'd bet there'd be a market for whale oil again. (Hm, I wonder if I could outfit my dinghy as a whaling vessel? Will FMJ 7.62x54r bring down a humpback?)
Makes the whole process seem less dignified, though, flushing the remains into the city's blackwater system like a dead goldfish...
"You can't just leave them out for the raccoons".
What?! Oh, heck. I've got to go do something.
This all seems excessively complicated. There's a much easier way to liquefy bodies: build a giant Cuisinart and drop them in, then hit "puree". The slurry can be put to multiple uses I'm sure. Squeeze out the fluid and use the rest as fertilizer maybe.
I've always been partial to burial at sea - with a little preparation (and a few carefully chosen rocks), there's very little risk of running into the departed during a casual beach-side stroll, and it provides a valuable source of food for marine scavengers.
I suspect it would also work out even greener than the "soupinator 3000" or whatever the new gizmo's called.
Soylent Green is people!
As a sailor, I prefer the option of burial at sea.
I am pretty sure I saw an ad of laboratory scale rotary blade homogenizer "which can reduce a mouse into pulp in seconds". Why don't they just scale one up?
Soylent Green was already mentioned, that was on my mind too. But the concept of mechanically recovered meat comes to my mind as well.
The religion of Blessed Gaia has absolutely no respect on human beings and their remains and no such concept as "dignity".
To misquote Philip J. Fry, at least we won't have to worry about the departed returning as zombies.
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