The traditional Southern African burial custom is to put the deceased in a sitting position, and cover the hole with stones. In some places when there are heavy rains, the bones come back to visit.
In Madagascar, the deceased is put in a "house" - replica of one, suitable for what the Springbok Nude Girls might've called afterlife satisfaction.
Those two ideas come together to form a solution for the problem of eventually running out of burial space that will trouble future generations, and which thus needs to be planned for. Extend the Malagassy funerary "house" to a funerary "apartment", but to save space, let all the deceased members of a family share .. er .. unliving space??
When we're dead (and also scared of being burnt for Vishnu or Odin - or Richard Dawkins) we could go and sit nice and peacefully on a bench next to dear old Dad, and granny, and the rest of them. Perhaps there's a nice window in front of us. Perhaps we are plastinated by the techniques of Gunther Von Hagens. (There are all sorts of ways in which we could .. be dead .. better than by being deep under the ground among the worms).
The living could then visit the dead more easily. In African traditional culture such visits are important, so this may be even bakable one day, here. There would need to be facilities for sacrificing cattle, too... but that's getting too much into detail.
Imagine how many dead people you could house per square cubit this way. The floors of the building could be sitting-room-only high, and we all know how the dead actually don't like personal space. And wouldn't they be happier sitting up, so they can see each other and not get lonely, than lying there all .. laid out?-- skoomphemph, Apr 04 2014 Truly high rise Ethermal_20Resting_20Place [theircompetitor, Apr 04 2014] Almost related to burial at sea. http://gutenberg.ne...oks06/0608221h.htmlDodge past all the high rhetoric and poetry-contaminated beginning to about 100 lines down. There Blind Captain Cat meets the long-drowned, and they converse ... uh ... like the visitors to the pyramid downtown would converse with their deceased pets and relatives. [skoomphemph, Apr 04 2014] Near-Death Star http://theinfosphere.org/Near_Death_StarFuturama did it first [Spacecoyote, Apr 11 2014] What confuses me here, is what is the "success criteria" for a proper burial?
That definition is highly subjective, and the most common methods are highly irrational/wasteful & vary widely between cultures/religions.
So, I find it hard to come up with burial methods that are "better", since I have no objective metric to judge what is better.
If we're trying to make it better just from resource- consumption, then cremation or compost wins already.-- sophocles, Apr 04 2014 Trouble is some people more than just don't-want to be burnt or composted, and it is their right (for which we all would willingly die) to be wrong. ... (Ah! Ian Anderson. Knew that wasn't one of mine)...
This is a compromise. In South Africa it's quite an optimal compromise, even. Give up the burial part of the traditional funeral, and you get something better. (As in convenient access to the dead - something the modern world has made awkward). Even in other countries where you're not meant to ask the dead for their opinions (and would recently have been horribly tortured for doing so), the scheme offers the advantage of something nicer than a hole in the ground, and yet more sprawl.-- skoomphemph, Apr 04 2014 Convetonal cremation in a retort or muffle is heavy on fossil fuels, and very wasteful.
Composting, or conversion to animal feed, makes much more sense.
Plastination is great, but sadly has a couple of serious limitations; one is that it's not possible to nomiate other people to be plastinated, and the other is that they only do it to dead people (except for Joan Collins, but then there's always one, isn't there ?)-- 8th of 7, Apr 04 2014 I would go for being buried at sea, personally, but the neighbours behind will be buried upright after a cow has cried out the the ancestors, and the next door neighbours are Catholics who say they've already had a human sacrifice, and who will be laid out flat in an expensive box buried deep enough to prevent embarrassment in the case of any Lazarus incident. I want an excuse to plastinate them all instead.-- skoomphemph, Apr 04 2014 An acquaintance of mine had her husband buried standing up. It wouldn't have been as much of an issue if he'd been dead.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 04 2014 At sea?-- skoomphemph, Apr 04 2014 I wish I could be pinned down on a reef to pay back the lobster community.-- normzone, Apr 04 2014 Looks like your only chance of that is to do it indirectly by going down among the Monkfish in deeper waters.
My <link> is only slightly related to burial at sea.-- skoomphemph, Apr 04 2014 // I wish I could be pinned down on a reef to pay back the lobster community //
Everyone else wants your wish to be fulfilled, and the sooner the better - even the people that hate lobsters …-- 8th of 7, Apr 04 2014 Old person dies in an apartment, because of lack of social connections no one knows for quite a while sometimes...so this is just formalising the process.....
//I would go for being buried at sea,
Tough on the gravediggers, maybe scuba tanks?-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 04 2014 They would have to bail out a grave that is constantly weighed down with corresponding masses of brick, sand or old bones so as not to bob in a disconcerting and ennervating manner. When the grave is 6 feet deep, according to some harmoniously determined datum, the magnificent corpse can be ceremoniously lowered into the grave to the sound of massed choirs and howling winds lashing the crowds of weeping mourners ...
oops, got a bit carried away there ...
When the body is laid to rest, some handsfull of sand can be thrown in and some bricks removed to compensate. And so on.
Finally a tasteful arrangement of plastic flowers and artificial lawn can be laid on top of the last sod, and the grave can set off on its voyage, and be visited by admirers and worshippers throughout the world. It would make a small but adequate beach, mid-Ocean, where these are seldom encountered.-- skoomphemph, Apr 05 2014 Concrete boats are WKTE, and the Phoenix caissons used in the Mulberry harbours floated adequately, so a floating grave made of masonry isn't entirely impractical.-- 8th of 7, Apr 05 2014 random, halfbakery