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Comment by Beltiras | Hacker News Reader

I've asked my lone offspring to dispose of my bodily remains in the most convenient way possible when the time comes. The only request I make of him is that nobody reserves a place on earth in my name. No headstone or any of that.

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I'd go for Diogenes of Sinope's request of what to do with his body after death:

To be left outside with a stout stick, so my corpse can either be eaten by dogs, or fight them off should it find this upsetting.

In theory if tombstones are to last forever, the whole world would eventually become graveyards.

Permanent individual graves is a modern anglosphere thing. In Europe, grave plots are normally rented, and if the family stops paying, the remains are moved to a mass grave or cremated and the plot is re-used.

“cemetery associations often are required to establish and fund perpetual or maintenance trust funds”

Graveyards are hardly subsidized, they are for-profit businesses, and even if they run out of space, could survive through two major depressions before bankruptcy.

> Graveyards are hardly subsidized

How much in land taxes do they pay?

“Permanent” tombstones are often limited to 30 years. It’s probable I will lay in my grand parents cemetery, but probably not alongside them.

If there’s a 30 year limit, why are tombstones that are >30yrs still standing in most cases?

One of the oldest cemeteries in my town has dates going as far back as mid-1800s and I don’t think they go through periodically and dig bodies up.

It depends very much on which country you are from. US/UK seem to have burial plots forever. Many European countries have a rental/lease system where you get the plot for 30-50 years, and that can be extended if wanted by the family/estate/descendants, or the plot is re-used.

They won't bother unless they start running out of space.

I ran those numbers: 51.08 million square miles / (4 ft * 8 ft) = 44.5 trillion.

Estimates are for 100 billion humans have ever lived, plus (currently) 255 human births per minute (and falling) = 331,017 years

Well hopefully we're space faring by then!

Burial at C it is then.

Home, home on Lagrange...

Go with a "natural death" arrangement, where your body will not be embalmed (formaldehyde is nasty stuff), and will be buried in a vessel that biodegrades quickly, in a forest or similar area.

I'm going with this method when I eventually die.

I want a Viking funeral myself.

But, more seriously, part of me hopes that I'll recognize when my time is coming and be able to just wander off into the woods or something and die that way, with my body left where it drops. Even though I feel like that might be against what the article is suggesting.

That sounds like a great idea....unless you are the poor person who stumbles upon the decomposing corpse.

Of course, for that you have to tell people about your immediate plan. If you simply "disappear", this will likely trigger a very expensive rescue expedition that will find your freshly dead corpse, and it will ruin your Viking funeral.

I'll recognize when my time is coming and be able to just wander off into the woods or something and die that way, with my body left where it drops.

Please don't do that. It sucks seriously for the people who have to go find you when the missing person report is filed, and it really, really sucks for the "doesn't know what is going on" person who finds your body. Predators are not exactly 100% effective.

Hikers disappear all the time and it's rare for bodies to be found when no one is specifically looking for them. In the wilderness, unless it's somewhere like on Mount Everest where bodies are naturally preserved by freezing, corpses tend to disappear pretty quickly. Predators are not 100% effective, but scavengers are pretty close, especially because there's so damned many of them ranging from insects to worms to birds and mammals.

Rare is not the same as won’t. Save some folks some potential trauma.

Fair point.

Conversely, if you want to fake your own death, disappearing in the wilderness ("hiking accident") is one of the most reliable and plausible cover stories. People who disappear at sea wash up on shore a hell of a lot more often than people who disappear in the wilderness are ever seen.

Do you have any more information about this? Surely there must be some pretty strict rules on where the "forest or similar area" is?

I kind of wanted to be shot into deep space, but eaten by worms seems more apt.

I would recommend the Ask A Mortician YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath

It's extremely informative and promotes a natural look at death and the necessary arrangements you can make.

Or sign up for cryonics and try not dying in the first place.

Great way to piss away your estate for no reason.

It’s not like you can spend it on anything else at that point.

If the odds are 1%, or 0.01%, it’s still personally worthwhile.

...assuming you never had children?

Even if I never have children, I'd rather donate my estate to a worthy cause than spend it on cyrogenically freezing my body with the hope of eventual resurrection.

There is this thing called life insurance which nearly all cryonicists use to fund their suspension and storage.

That doesn't make any sense. Life insurance isn't cheaper if you promise to spend it on cryonic storage. It's just a part of your estate, and there are better things you can do with that.

Well it's technically not part of the estate, but a policy held by the cryonics organization. But that's missing the point. You can pay for cryonics without writing people out of your will.

If you're wiling to take Pascal's wager like that, you could just practice a religion for free.

Many aren’t free, but a bigger problem is that many are mutually exclusive. Which one do you go for? It’s not as easy to say “the one I grew up with” as it was in Pascal’s era.

Declining Pascal’s Wager just because two religions are equally probable makes you Buridan’s ass (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass): a donkey who starves to death because he can’t choose between two identical bales of hay. But I think there are probably decision-theoretic ways of even refining Pascal’s Wager; not every religion is mutually exclusive, or holds mutually exclusive beliefs about the afterlife, and not every set of religious beliefs is equally probable. Also, from both an EV and a pure probability perspective, I would tend to avoid religions that seem designed to extract as much money as possible from its followers.

Good points. Can you go into more detail about “not every set of religious beliefs is equally probable”?

That would literally be a religious argument, so I won't name examples, but many religious beliefs can either be tested empirically, have implications that can be tested empirically. If the religion exists in a social or organizational context where there are obvious vested worldly interests for the leaders of an organization to further certain beliefs (money, power, etc.) and those beliefs are designed to further those worldly interests, that would be a signal of improbability as well. Furthermore, for two sets of religious beliefs that share the same base texts and doctrines, the theological and exegetical doctrines can be judged on their own logic and decide between the two.

To put it bluntly (and give a contrived, fictitious example), a religion that believes in a flat earth that rests on the back of a unicorn that was created by a committee of gods 34 months ago (complete with false evidence and memories of what happened before) based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the New Testament that demands that you give 75% of your money to The Glorious Spiritual Leader and then have sex with him, would be particularly improbable compared to almost any other religion.

Thanks. Would it be reasonable for me to assume that you have a religious belief? I ask because your explanation seems like the kind of reasoning I would have used before I came to believe that no spiritual afterlife was plausible, and that all religions which claimed one were equally untrue (Boltzmann brains and digital afterlives are not spiritual in this sense, as they do not presume a nonphysical soul).

You are misinformed. Cryonics is largely paid through life insurance.

Technology to resurrect [them] won't be around for 200 years and at that point the now current nation-state and international contracts won't have any standing. Welcome to being part of a convenient un-rights'ed anonymous forever-slave underclass. It would be interesting to know how best those who select cryonics now will be exploited then. Rich enough to afford it and optimistic and gullible enough to think it will turn out right.

That is funny, my only instruction is to dispose of me in such a way that those who cared about me can be close to the grave.

To me a headstone or other grave marking is a way to help those who grieve the loss.

Can you explain why you don't want one?

“Asking” means it probably won’t happen. You need to put it in a will.

Wills are generally executed long after the body is dealt with. Probate can take years and a body needs to be handled almost immediately.

If you can handle the morbidity of it, you can arrange for your own burial or cremation and even pay ahead of time; there are usually big discounts, since they can't shake you down the same way they can shake down a grieving widow or whatnot.

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