Hacker News Reader

Comment by apower | Hacker News Reader

This actually is a novel idea. And it saves space. Pack more deads per square meter.

I imagine making every single coffin into a drill capable of boring a hole into the earth is a lot more expensive than buying a couple of sets of digging equipment per cemetery.

On the other hand, if you're going to bring in machinery, you need to make sure that there's enough space to stop them from crushing the other coffins - which might negate any space-savings from burying people vertically. Whereas with this, a few people put it in, which needs very little space. Besides, don't the families of deceased generally pay for their coffins?

I think finding people who can manhandle an abnormally large, heavy, drill shaped coffin into place will be harder and more expensive than using machinery - there's a reason why we don't dig graves by hand any more.

Families do pay for the coffins, but they also pay for burial costs as well (so they'd also be paying for space and a portion of the machinery).

Of course cremation saves more space and is certainly cheaper.

My personal funeral arrangement is going to be on the lines of "throw my corpse on a pile of logs and light her up", if my survivors want something fancy, that's their deal I'm already dead, just get it over and done with and carry on with life.

I'm either getting an autopsy or donating when I die, either way I'm going to be stuffed with sawdust. I'm not going to make good worm food, so you might as well torch me.

Completely besides the point, but: sawdust is perfectly useful as fertilizer, so it's actually not that bad as worm food.

This might be worth it in some very old cemeteries in Europe, given considerations mentioned in other comments about the coffin being 10 feet tall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com