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Mushroom burial suit turns dead bodies into clean compost (2016)
- madengr 8y agoLiquification is another method, essentially pressure cooked in a lye solution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_disposal) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_di...
- burfog 8y agoNot much can beat a sky burial. Tibetians sometimes still do it. If you search around, you can find a photo sequence documenting it. The only notable modernization is plastic aprons for the workers. They strip and slash the body, then step back and let vultures eat. After the vultures have left only large bones, the workers smash up the bones with a bit of oatmeal in a bowl. The vultures like that too, ultimately leaving nothing uneaten.
- wintergrasp 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis
- salty_biscuits 8y agoI went to a place where they did that when I was younger. We were visiting a monastery and were told to be respectful because there was a sky burial going on while we were there. We decided to just look around but to keep away from the ceremony. I was really out of it with altitude sickness so I was just sitting looking down at this gorgeous valley near the bus, while the people I was with went to look around the monastery. Then I could see all these vultures flying away with little bits of meat. Very surreal experience.
- colesdefectum 8y agoSome skydivers will have "ash dives." Your body is cremated, ashes placed into a specially designed pouch, and friends take you up on a final skydive. Everyone exits, joins up in a formation with your pouch making up one of the links, and at some point in free fall the pouch gets opened. You're quickly scattered to the ends of the earth from a couple miles up. Even though there's no cremation involved, Tibetan sky burial sort of reminds me of that.
- eatbitseveryday 8y agoWas also a TED Talk on this. https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee/ https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee/ Edit: looks like it is linked in the article too.
- steve19 8y agoThe article claims the mushrooms break down heavy metals. How do they do that? I know there are marine bacteria that can convert mercury into a less toxic form, but I am surprised some mushrooms can convert ALL the toxic heavy metals in our bodies into something less toxic.
- yongjik 8y agoAccording to Wikipedia on the lead designer: > She earned a B.A. degree in psychology from Wellesley College (1998) and an M.S. degree in visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). My bet is that this doesn't really work, or, well, maybe it does, in the exact same way a buried dead body eventually decomposes.
- steve19 8y agoThat was my first thought. If a body is not pumped full of preservatives, it would surely grow all sort of fungus and bacteria like any other dead aminal buried in the ground.
- chillingeffect 8y agoI can give away the entire game here. I was in her class when Jae-Rhim designed this project. It was a class taught by [sic] Kzysztof Wodczizco called "Interrogative Design." He was at MIT then and is at Harvard now. [a] The whole point of Kzyzstof's Interrogative Design practice is to design something half-ass and make it seem serious as hell to get people talking and improving the idea. It "asks a question." It's not taking the piss out of the audience, because the audience is already lulled into a consumer trance of evaluating every possible purchase and can generally be led into doing the problem-solving work. In fact, it's mainly taking the piss out of the artists because half the time they think their design will actually work. Wodiczko has incredible cache from being part of the resistance to Communism in Poland. He impressed me, but made me incredibly cynical. Like many designers, he practiced an ideology that brought his audience so close to understanding life through aesthetic and psychological principles (bit of Jung, bit of Deleuze, bit of Steve Jobs), but ultimately left them cold, positioning himself as a thought leader, expecting the rest of the world to complete his projects, using their imagination and the money he gets from universities. For instance, when I took the class, he was obsessed with Moses and viewed the bible as a design exercise. He wanted us to come up with something as persuasive as the stone tablets. I guess I'm just another idealistic geek who thinks technical facts matter and people can do the right thing without being led around by fairie tales. [a] https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/krzysztof-wodiczko/ https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/krzysztof-wodiczko/
- zarmin 8y agoI want to be buried in terra preta wearing a mushroom suit.
- noobly 8y agoI hope my pals use my corpse for some cubensis when I'm ripe for it.
- itronitron 8y agoI was hoping for pictures, but the company page for the Infinity Burial Suit sells t-shirts! I can't think of a better gift for the Goth in someone's life.
- cstross 8y agoNovelist brain is now feverishly working out ways to use this in a crime novel. (Probably one involving a smart serial killer.)
- jlangenauer 8y agoThere was an episode of Hannibal where this sort of thing was part of the plot - using bodies to grow fungi.
- nabla9 8y agoI don't see how mushrooms can get rid of heavy metals as said in the article.
- mikro2nd 8y agoThey don't "get rid" of heavy metals in any absolute sense, but they do remove them from the environment, concentrating the metals within the fruit bodies of the fungus where they can be easily "harvested" and processed to either recover the metals or sequester them from the rest of the environment. Fungi are also spectacularly good at remediating hydrocarbon-polluted soils and related material - even deeply polluted sites that are normally just fenced off and "forgotten" as toxic-waste sites. Take a look at some of Paul Stamets's talks on your favourite Tube site.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoI'm surprised sea burials aren't more of a thing. Much the same but easier to deal with the body really. The boat serves as a function room so is set-up ready to go always and has business model flexibility if you want to take people out for a harbour cruise other days.
- KineticLensman 8y ago> I'm surprised sea burials aren't more of a thing I have friends who started a small boat tour company and found that sea burials made up quite a large proportion of their business. They were jokingly wondering whether to pivot and call their new company "The Final Wave".
- fjsolwmv 8y agoFor more somber traditionalists, overboard the body in a No Wake Zone.
- rough-sea 8y agoI guess people want a specific place to visit and remember.
- michaelcampbell 8y agoWhich requires a body present?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dusted 8y agoGetting human bodies to decompose underground is not trivial. The idea is nice, but I think the idea of a burial forest is much nicer, as it gives an excuse to plant some trees, and provides multiple moral perspectives for not chopping them down again. The burial forest idea is basically that you bury someone, and plant a tree on top, like a tombstone, but, a tombtree, and that tree is then both a memorial for the deceased, and, more importantly, it is a tree, and trees are nice to have around.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoI would prefer to be buried with as little environmental impact as possible, so a forest burial seems like a good ide. Equally as important is that I would prefer a joyful wake, one where friends and family get together and remember all the best times we had together, and to celebrate a life well lived. Have a grand old party in my name, and remember to enjoy the good things in life.
- mongol 8y agoHow does that work in the long perspective? At one point it either falls over by itself, or it is chopped down? If it falls over by itself, what is done with it then?
- dusted 8y agoIt will not be chopped down. The idea is to plant a forest which is in some form of the word "sacred", a place that is respected, because it is nature reclaimed, or because it is a resting place of the dead. If a tree falls over (some live many hundreds of years), it will rot and take on its natural role in nature as food for fungus and other life. As people die, the forest grows. It shouldn't be maintained, the land should be considered spent, given back. Forests and nature in general managed just fine without human intervention, and indeed, us valiantly putting out forest fires have only made forest fires more dangerous as forests are now denser than they'd have been with natural pruning.
- adrianN 8y agoYou plant two trees, one for the deceased human and one for the dead tree.
- ryannevius 8y agoIf this interests you, Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets is an interesting dissertation on how mushrooms can "save the planet." His TED talks are a decent intro as well.
- fernandopj 8y agoInteresting Start Trek: Discovery homage I didn't know until reading this: the Discovery ship runs in a form of subspace called "mycelial network", using a "mycelium drive", whose inventor is called... "Paul Stamets".
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoI assume this is coming up again because it was recently announced that celebrity Luke Perry was buried in a mushroom suit: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/04/entertainment/luke-perry-mushroom-suit-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/04/entertainment/luke-perry-mush...
- ben7799 8y agoShades of "The Expanse" and "Silo" series. IIRC Wool, etc.. had people being decomposed right back into the farm area, and the Expanse has bodies being fed into the "recycler".
- agentultra 8y agoThis is beautiful. I can't think of a better way to go. Mushrooms are the best!
- logfromblammo 8y agoOr have someone lay out your corpse on the ground, cover it with staked-down chicken wire to keep large scavengers from moving the body around, and dump some Dermestid beetles on it to accelerate the process. Between the beetles and the corpse flies that show up naturally, the soft tissues pupate, molt, and fly away a few grams at a time, leaving a cleaned skeleton. I'm putting that in my next testament, along with artfully arranging the bones in a clear polyurethane casting resin, so that I can creep out generations of my descendants as a plastic heirloom.
- cascom 8y agowhat is the solution to deal with all of the inorganic/e-waste that are in most people's bodies these days (pacemakers, artificial hips, etc.)
- shujito 8y agopage looked white until I blocked scripts on it
- ajhaupt7 8y agoOn a related note, the state of Washington is about to legalize human composting -- https://thecompost.io/articles/the-kids-arent-alright#composting-grandpa https://thecompost.io/articles/the-kids-arent-alright#compos...
- devy 8y agoHow is this Mushroom method compare to the leading green cremation of Alkaline Hydrolysis that has been around for over 130 years?[1] [1]: https://www.frazerconsultants.com/2016/06/dissolved-bodies-sewers-alkaline-hydrolysis-debunked/ https://www.frazerconsultants.com/2016/06/dissolved-bodies-s...
- mymythisisthis 8y agoWe need new rituals in our society. I want my body to be eaten using dermestide beetles to clean my bones http://beetlestobonesskullcleaning.com/ http://beetlestobonesskullcleaning.com/ We need to punish people that do environmental damage, like use embalm chemicals.
- asadlionpk 8y agoHuman bodies decompose on their own. Just bury. Muslims have been doing that for over a thousand years and it just works. It's one of those things that we (specially the west) are over-engineering. Same goes for using paper in restrooms. I am waiting for the west to evolve and just use water already.