How Will We Bury Our Dead in the Future, and in Outer Space? Shake Well
Posted by Sam_Gellman on Friday, Sep 03, 2010
If you ever died in space, would you want your remains brought back to Earth? How would your fellow astronauts cope with the pressures of dealing with your body? How would they bring it back home?
Mary Roach, incessant investigator of space exotica and author of “Packing for Mars,” answers at Boing Boing a question that may become pressing as astronauts head to Mars, on months-long trips laced with intense radiation and psychological pressure: What happens after a death in space, months away from Earth?
Swedish ecologists Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak and Peter Mäsak say they have an answer: an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation and burial, called Promession.
The technique entails freezing a body, vibrating it into tiny pieces, and then freeze-drying the pieces, which can then be used as compost to grow a memorial shrub or tree. The pair recently collaborated with NASA and design students in Denmark and Sweden to adapt Promession for use on a Mars mission.
The dead crew member’s body would be placed in a container, called the Body Back, and moved into the airlock. Exposed to space, the body freezes in about an hour. A robotic arm then pulls the Body Back container out of the airlock, dangles it on a tether, and activates a vibration system. (The tether prevents vibration damage to the spacecraft’s instrumentation.) After 15 minutes of vibration, the frozen corpse is reduced to small pieces. Water is evaporated from the remains using microwaves, leaving about 25 kilograms of dry powder inside the Body Back. The container is left outside the spacecraft until it’s time to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, at which point the robotic arm pulls it back inside to keep it from burning up during reentry. The Body Back folds into a smaller shape that “will not unveil that there is a corpus inside.”
The process is already being pushed on Earth as an ecologically friendly alternative to conventional or natural burial. But it’s a bit more complicated: the dearly departed are dipped into liquid nitrogen, which freezes the body at minus 321 degrees. An ultrasound machine vibrates the frozen and brittle body to a coarse powder in about 60 seconds; the resulting powder is then run through a vacuum chamber that removes water, while a magnet separates out surgical parts, dental fillings, and other medical devices. (The company behind it, Promessa, only has a Swedish website)
The volume of remains left behind – about 60 pounds of dry, odorless organic matter – is about ten to twenty times that left by a cremation, but the process would avoid the release of pollutants into the atmosphere (for instance, mercury vapor from dental fillings). As the remains – or promains – get wet inside a biodegradable container in the ground, they naturally decompose, composting the earth and providing nourishment to a garden above. Total cost is estimated at around $1000.
While no one has done it yet – legal wrangling over the process continues – the thought of becoming plant food, and not just a body in a pine box, certainly sounds nice.
Then again, you’re dead.
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