If life is a long goodbye, then some technology funeral companies hope that everyone will prepare for it as soon as possible.
Investors with a keen sense of smell have already made a move, and according to Crunchbase, there have been more than 26 financings for new funeral service companies in the past three years alone. From May 1, 2020, the U.S. state of Washington allows the treatment of human remains using natural organic reduction and alkaline hydrolysis methods. Previously, Washington state law only recognized burials and cremations.
Does the new type of funeral only bring about a change in the form of funeral?
Burials, coffins and funerary items, which are the longest prevalent, are difficult to degrade, and chemicals such as preservatives can contaminate the surrounding soil and groundwater after chemically treated remains, and unnaturally dead bodies may also carry pathogens or parasites, and direct burial risks causing infectious diseases.
The Negro carries the coffin
Although cremation has become the mainstream, the pollutants produced by incineration also have a serious impact on the air: cremation of the remains will produce carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and other gases, and the global cremation alone emits up to 6.8 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, and the metal vaporization implanted in the body such as dental filling materials will also pollute the air. At the same time, cremation requires a lot of fuel. To keep burning for two or three hours, the fuel needed to cremate a body is enough to provide a car with more than 7,000 kilometers to travel.
A new approach is "liquid cremation" – the company will use a high-temperature strong alkali solution in specialized equipment to decompose the remains into basic elements such as protein, salt, amino acids, water, etc., and then cooperate with farms and forest farms to use it as organic fertilizer. Once a parody of the song "In another twenty years, we will meet, you pile up a bunch of me, all sent to the farm to make fertilizer", it can really be achieved.
Another new way is to "send it into space." Spacecraft carrying "some form" of remains will fly around the earth, land on the moon, and even fly deep into the universe, never looking back. According to the company's official website, the next launch will be in December this year, and the aircraft carrying the ashes or DNA fragments of the three participants will fly around the earth until it loses power, falls back into the atmosphere, and becomes a shining meteor. This kind of romance of "He Dangruo meteor, a flash to the king" is only $2495 at the minimum, $4995 into the orbit of the Earth, and $12500 in the orbit of the moon and into deep space, at least much more than the traditional funeral.
According to a survey by life insurance agency Sunlife, the average funeral costs in various countries around the world are equivalent to 10% of the annual salary of local individuals, the highest cost is as high as 22,000 pounds in Japan, and the average funeral costs in Germany, the United States, the Netherlands and other countries are above 5,000 pounds. In China, the average funeral expenses are also close to 40,000 yuan, accounting for about 45% of the average annual salary.
Average funeral expenses as a percentage of individual annual salary in some countries (Source: sunlife.co.uk)
Economical and environmentally friendly, perhaps these new types of funerals are more in line with the needs of people in the 21st century. After all, the idea of materialism already holds an unshakable position.
But in the 20th century, such an approach is unlikely to work. If there is no Tomb of the Seventy-two Martyrs of Huanghuagang, how can the latecomers lament that "the face of the Nine Plains is true as seen, and the mountains and rivers are always different", and how can they mourn "reading the monument and weeping human affairs, and the new ghost is not alone for the neighbor's shadow"? The revolutionary elite believes that the heroic souls of the ancestors are always there, and the rude like Xiang Lin sister-in-law also thinks of "donating a threshold" in order to be at ease underground.
Until the 1990s, the elderly in some places also doubted the "utility" of cremation, fearing that cremation would hinder "passing away". They often fake their deaths for burial before the government's cremation policy is in place. A comedy starring Zhao Lirong and Wei Zongwan, "Filial Piety and Grandson Waiting", has bitterly satirized this.
Stills from the movie "Filial Piety and Grandchildren Waiting"
The form of funeral is actually defined by people's imagination after death. If the lamp of death is extinguished, it does not matter what kind of way it is. If the soul is immortal, and death is only a sequence of life, then naturally there must be a spiritual banner, a bright instrument, a coffin, a burial chamber, a yellow spring, and an immortal world... The need for complex, traditional funeral rites no longer means that we no longer have any imagination of the world after death.
Interestingly, we all believe in materialism and tend to humorously call death "see Marx." This statement reflects people's ambivalence. Because, logically, if there is no soul after death, there is no question of "who" seeing "whom".
Author | The main writer of the South Wind Window is Rong Wisdom
Edit | Zhao Yi
Typography | Weng Jie