Future Mummies Will Be Dried and Vacuum-Packed

It isn't pleasant to imagine your body's inevitable decomposition—your taut, yoga-toned limbs going through a process called “putrefaction,” but what are your alternatives? Cremation? Donating your body to science? How about desiccating your corpse in a hermetically sealed chamber under the ground? No? You think vacuum-packing your corpse is weird? Well, someone thought it was a good idea, which is why they took out a patent on exactly that.

A doctor named Kurt Mikat from Windermere, Florida was granted this patent yesterday for a sealed burial chamber with a vacuum pump to pump all the gas or water vapor from the interior, which is supposed to dry out the corpse, and prevent any further decomposition.

So what is the plan for the device patented under the title “Method and Apparatus for Preserving Human and Animal Remains?" Well, the blog Improbable Research discovered that Mikat is actually starting a small business in the greater Orlando area called “Everlasting Preservation Systems,” which will use this patented process for exactly what you imagine.

It'd be easy to chalk this up to living so close to the rumored hiding place of Walt Disney's frozen head causing one to look at death and decay differently. But the Everlasting Preservation Systems gives a different reason, actually making an appeal to the environment, which I didn't see coming.

For one thing, some methods of disposing of human remains can result in pollution of the air or ground. For many it is an unpleasant thought to be burned up or to become food for worms or other organisms producing decay or just assimilation into other animals. Embalming toxins are not permanent and will eventually dissipate into the environment leaving the remains to decay although perhaps initially at a slower rate.

Maybe I just saw The Lion King at the right age, but “assimilation into other animals” is, if I'm not mistaken, the completion of the circle of life. On the other hand, that “embalming toxins” warning is no joke. Mother Jones reported that a typical adult body is embalmed with 3.5 gallons of formaldehyde before being buried, and formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. It's not really clear if formaldehyde can leak back into the groundwater after being buried, but Julie Weatherington-Rice, an environmental consultant pretty much guaranteed that it would. "[Formaldehyde] is going to show up," she told MoJo. "But it's going to take a while. We're probably drinking great-grandmother Maude right now more than we are someone who died last Saturday night." Her confidence comes from studying arsenic, which was used as an embalming fluid in the 19th century has been showing up near old cemeteries.

And cremation is a fairly energy-intensive process too, it turns out. "It requires a huge amount of energy to produce a column of fire that will burn at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for the two to three hours it will take to reduce a human body to about three pounds of dust," according to a Motherboard article from August 2013. "Some ways to understand how much energy: You could power 1500 televisions for an hour or drive 4,800 miles with that much energy, if you weren’t dead."

Who knows, there may be some advantages to the fairly weird-sounding (and looking) vacuum-pump interment. It should keep any corpse from exploding, which is a repulsive sounding problem caused by the body's decomposition without a place for the gases to escape . Incan mummies were preserved disquietingly well in the cold and dry air near the summit of an Argentinean volcano, but even Everlasting Preservation Systems admits that their process results in a smaller body and “may result in shrinkage of the facial features but this can be prevented by appropriate measures if desired.”

Heads are tricky. Apparently the utilitarian Jeremy Benthem left very specific instructions for what to do with his corporeal remains after he died, but using an old Maori method to desiccate Benthem's head “went disastrously wrong, robbing the head of most of its facial expression, and leaving it decidedly unattractive.”

So, yeah, vacuum pumps sort of make sense and might actually be the more utilitarian option. I'm not sure if I'm ready to consider my body as either food for worms or beef jerky yet, but it's nice to have options.