In “Underground
movements” (Nov. 12, 2009) I took a nearly
serious look at the problem of what to do with human remains on a planet
becoming short of both space and resources.
Donating healthy organs is a crude recycling scheme,
but its effect on the larger problem is minuscule, and in any event, what do we
do with the leftovers? The plot of the 1973 film Soylent Green turns on a
scheme by which the bodies of euthanized humans are processed into yummy and
nutritious wafers, which would quiet remarks back at the house after the
funeral about Grandma passing.
I added that the squeamish might
find some of science’s proposed remedies not much inferior in gruesomeness. One
is to convert bodies into various forms of safe-to-use compost by, say,
freeze-drying them.
We owe Tyler
Cowen for alerting us to this interesting story in the March 8,
2015 Financial Times. Hong King, we learn, is running out of places to
bury its dead. Not its corpses, understand, but crematory ashes. One funeral
services company has started encouraging its clients to commemorate their loved
ones by turning their ashes into gemstones.
Huh? A quick check of Wikipedia
reveals that, well, sure. A Chicago firm, LifeGem, is described as the first
U.S. company to develop a way to extract carbon from human remains — enough
purified carbon from a single cremated human body to synthesize up to 50 gems weighing
one carat each. That was in 2005. Several firms here and abroad now offer the
service.
I’m going to sign up, and one day I can become a Diamond Jim, at last.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2015.
