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Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: "It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people."

Doesn't "tanks" imply some sort of composting operation, rather than burning bodies?

Yes, it's not an identical situation, but I thought it was relevant because of the concept of recovering a dead body's resources for consumption by the remaining living humans.

There's lots of district heating in Germany for example, but it's usually fed from either big heat pumps, bio mass plants, or heat from waste incineration plants. There's no reason to not use excess heat from data centres too - I'm pretty sure I read that already being done in several places.

But in some cases, a data centre might be too remotely located, or the infrastructure is too lacking to make it economically feasible, which still leaves me wondering why you couldn't try to recuperate at least some of it as electricity on-site...

> I'm pretty sure I read that already being done in several places.

Presumably you read this very recently, since it's mentioned at the end of the article.

If wishes were fishes.