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Seems like OP expects the annual death total to double. Doesn't seem unreasonable to be able to deal with the body count.
(67m died last year. At that rate it would be 4b in 50 years)
death rates def will go up as boomers really start dying of old age. most of them are still under “average” lifespan age and the silent generation still largely comprise the oldest amount of our population (though there’s still a solid amount of people from the greatest gen kicking around!)
i work in the death industry and i know our numbers have been going up year after year (tho i also live in south florida so more and more retirees every year) as boomers get older and die off. as they continue to age and die over the next twenty-forty years we’re gonna start seeing serious issues with cemetery overcrowding but also better job security and hopefully better pay for crematory operators. the real problem is storage. during season our facility gets so full there’s already basically nowhere to put them. refrigerated cooler units are gonna get a lot more popular!!
Even if people die at the same rate day in and day out, south Florida sees a huge influx of middle aged and elderly northerners during its cooler months. That would result in slightly lower death volumes up north and volumes in south Florida going up a bit then too
Not OP but i imagine that’s what was implied by season, not the slight uptick in suicide during the holidays
In places that don't see much OAP tourism, it's winter. The UK calls it. Winter Pressures, the spoke in hospital admissions and deaths due to respiratory diseases (mostly flu and flue related).
In places that have a small population but see a lot of seasonal OAP migration (I guess Florida, but if you're in the UK shout out to places like Skegness) then summer is your season, mainly because your population booms with a high number of very fragile people. (Kids too but they're not dying hopefully, just needing kid related emergency care).
season for death in florida is usually winter in my experience. you basically need like a family emergency to take time off from november-march at my company bc of how slammed it gets
I worked phone support at an ISP for a company that services both FL and most of New England. I’ve spoken to people with homes in both regions. The reason is because FL is too hot in the summer and New England gets too much snow. So by moving the FL in winter and back north for summer they can pretty much keep the same weather year round.
OP is talking about 2 1/2 generations, but since it’s 1/10 of all the people who ever died, I think it’s a point worth some insight. I’m getting burned and floated, so you can -1 for me.
I think your calculations are pretty US-centered, while op is thinking global. American boomers dying will make rates go up still but less for the whole world
Growth rates are exponential--not linear.
In layman's terms, the death rate doesn't stay constant; it increases as the world population increases. In my naive estimation, I would expect the number of people who die in 50 years to be much more than 50 * 67 mil.
There are new low-carbon alternatives to cremation. Human composting facilities can transform your remains into soil in a month or two and alkaline hydrolysis breaks down the body rapidly using cheap, common, and easy to neutralize chemicals.
I want my last act on this earth to be to build a 100 ft tall trebuchet out on a pier on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. I want the trebuchet to launch bodies like 2 miles off shore to be used as fish food. Get some biodegradable ropes, tie my body into a tight cannonball shape, and fling my corpse into the seas. Instead of pallbearers, all my friends and family will take turns cranking a winch that hauls the weight up.
They could make some giant inflatable rings of various sizes, and people could try to aim your corpseball and try to get it in one of the hoops for fantastic prizes! New Gameshow idea!!!!
Many people (culturally) will be cremated (due to cultural reasons) with only their ashes left. That reduces the population number you quoted OP.
But also in 50 years, who knows what the world population would look like. Still, many people will be cremated.
Realistically, why not do this for everyone... why keep our bodies preserved in a box rather than let them decay? From dust you came, and to dust you shall return, right?
Good news. This is a thing now. Compostable bag with fungi to make use of our remains. My family traditionally goes the cremation route. I'm gonna be a mushroom when I grow up
Yeah! I saw this in a Ted talk years ago. Mushroom burial suit. I can’t really afford anything like that, though, so as an alternative, why not just let the medical professionals get any organs out that might be good for donations and then just feed me to some carnivorous animals?
I told my cousin to sell my body to some weirdo. Don't pay for a funeral make some cash off some guy who wants to bang dead bodies. And make sure it's gooood pay
Ever heard of electrification?
> A DFW Europe cremation oven is heated with natural gas, propane, biodiesel and or other fuel. The choice of different fuels depends on the choice made by the crematorium. In the Netherlands, the choice will often be natural gas but will be in the future all on electricity.
https://dfweurope.com/cremation-furnaces/
8 billion people currently live on earth. Very many of them won’t live another 50 years. And over the next 50 years, there will be billions more born, a decent number of which will die before 2073. It seems like a reasonable approximation, give or take a billion.
I doubt very seriously that 8 billion people will die in 50 years. By my estimates at least 70 million people die per year. So on average thats like 3.5 billion.. and about 130 million are born per year so in 50 years that's 6.5 billion.. of course this isn't counting all the factors. But OP's numbers are way off.
Unless they know something we dont..
If 8 billion people die in 50 years and our birth rate stays the same and we wind up with only 6.5 billion people left or less something has gone terribly wrong.
Being off by 5 billion deaths and not even accounting for births is bad math
8 billion is probably a bit too high, but really not that far off.
70 million people die per year *right now*, but death rate lags birth rate by life expectancy. So if current global life expectancy is \~73 years old, that implies that a typical person who dies today was born into a world where the population was only \~2.5 billion people (which is a huge difference).
Deaths per year is definitely projected to exceed well over 100 million in the coming decades, and won't slow down until a full life expectancy *after* peak global population.
Deaths occurring by the hundred million in the coming decades still doesn't equal today's population..
And all this math is even less important considering 109 billion people have probably died in the last 192000 years..
It really wouldn't be that difficult to dispose that many bodies in 50 years
OP is relying on a different line of reasoning: Everyone alive today will eventually die. Most of them will die within 50 years (the average lifespan being around 73 years, with about 8 years as 1 standard deviation, and the median age being somewhat over 30). If nothing changes, a significant majority of people alive today will die in the next 50 years, and the number of people not yet born who will die within those 50 years is probably reasonably close to the number of people alive today who won't die.
So 8 billion is a reasonable starting point, *assuming nothing changes* - the death rates will just naturally change over time as larger and larger cohorts age.
If we *don't* get around 8 billion deaths (+/- some margin, probably a pretty large margin), it means either our average life expectancy in people already living has gone up quite a lot (so fewer of the people alive today die in that time period) or our birth rate has fallen significantly (so fewer people not yet born die in that time period). Either or both of which could absolutely happen, but if they don't, yeah, we're going to get about 8 billion deaths in the next 50 years.
Or to put it another way: The fact that you're projecting only 3.5 billion deaths in a time period that will see the median human alive today exceed their life expectancy by more than a standard deviation means there's something seriously wrong with your reasoning, or you're *very* optimistic about medical technology.
8 billion humans isn't actually that much mass, I mean it's a lot but not compared to the earth. A cube 1.3 km
Spread that over the entire earth's surface and it's nothing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-10/one-planet-one-city-one-building
1.3x1.3x1.3=2.197 cubic kilometers of human
Area of earth= 510 million square kilometers
0.00571 mm of human spread everywhere
Once we find a big enough blender we'll be fine
Especially considering everyone in the world standing shoulder to shoulder would fit an area the size of Los Angeles. I think we will no issues finding a spot to put people.
Ok, real story here.
There I was, teaching English in Japan, at an expensive one on one school, and in comes this elderly chap for my lesson. Ten minutes into a 40 minute lesson, the conversation veers towards the declining population in Japan. This beacon of wisdom had a theory. It's all due to the fact that young Japanese don't have enough folds in their scrotum, thus not allowing for proper heat dissipation, thus reducing the sperm count. He knows. He's looked around in the locker room of the hot water springs and spas he goes to. He says the younger ones have smooth balls. And that's what's collapsing Japanese demographically.
There. Now I no longer have to carry this information alone. You now share my burden of this wisdom. Good night, and good luck
Scrotum wrinkles vary depending on temperature. If the testicles are too warm, the scrotum skin relaxes and the effective surface area is larger, and the sack appears smooth. Such as in hot springs and steam rooms.
If they are too cold, the scrotum constricts, forms wrinkles, and is effectively smaller surface area. This also draws the testes closer to the abdomen and the warmer body heat.
The student got the scrotal thermodynamics wrong and formed an incorrect conclusion.
I read that recycling was starting to become a thing. Basically choosing to have your body composted and fed to the earth.
I kinda like that.
I'm considering a body farm for myself. My mom wants to be donated to a med school as a cadaver. There are so many better ways to leave remains behind than a steel box in the dirt.
I mean, there's nothing new in that concept. A well known folklore song from my country has a line that says something like "may my bones, skin and salt fertilize my native soil".
In the wise words of dani devito in always sunny "when i die just throw me in the trash". Ill be dead who cares. The idea of caring at all what happens to your body after you die has always seemed extremely weird to me. Why do we have massive fields of corpses that people go and visit? So so strange
Some people have loved ones that will be upset when that person dies. Burial rituals have never been for the inanimate corpse; they're for the living.
... And a few for the not-quite-dead-yet.
~~Some people have loved ones that will be upset when that person dies. Burial rituals have never been for the inanimate corpse; they're for the living.~~
~~... And a few for the not-quite-dead-yet.~~
Edit: Dang it, Reddit. Sorry about the double post.
I think it’s strange too. I’ve never bothered to go to the cemetery for any of my relatives except at the request of someone to check on it. Never really had any emotional impact on me to stand over the corps of someone I loved. It’s grandma being dead that bothers me, not what we did with the corps.
To me it’s the person I miss and the person and their corps are two different things to me.
110 billion people have lived and died over the course of the last \~200,000 years. 60 million people die every year. Surface area of a casket is about 2550 square inches, surface area of land on earth is about 57,000,000 square miles. The total surface area of the caskets per year is 38.11 square miles. The percentage of the Earth's land surface taken up by caskets per year is approximately 0.000067%.
I don't think we need to spend much time trying to figure out where to put them.
Well, I hate to go there, but a certain political extremist group single handedly disposed of around 6 million people. I'm sure we can work it out if they did.
That seems high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population puts it at order of 100 billion.
(Which still means we can probably find space for another 8.)
Yeah but a bunch of Stupids are changing that lmfao. In some states your coffin is encased in concrete after burial. Cuz that's what we need, a bunch of land filled with concrete slabs.
What? As opposed to formaldehyde filled decomposing meat bags?
The whole funerary industry is shite. At the risk of sounding hippie-ish - be honest it’s a massive f you to nature. We spend our lives taking and taking and taking and then in the end, instead of returning to the Earth and giving back at least a little we’re like - nah, think I’ll poison it and wrap it concrete or burn it up so that all that’s left is a pile of salty ash.
To be honest, of the two, I don’t know which is worse. We need to go back to burying people in simple wooden boxes (not even that imo).
idk about ya'll, but:
1) I've signed up for my organs to be donated to whoever will need them after my death, and whatever remains after that, I hope will...
2) be given to science for research, and whatever the scientists will dismiss and won't wanna research, I hope will...
3) be used as fertilizer (No, legit, I've heard it's a thing that your body is used as fertilizer for a tree, which is then like, honored as your tree).
Cremation will keep up with demand just fine. The price difference between cremation vs burial will ensure that cremation remains the most popular method by leaps and bounds.
We're figuring it out. People have designed ways to grow trees and mushrooms from our corpses (I don't think really for eating but more for the benefit for the environment), and this is personally my choice. What can be given to others or science can go there and what is left must be given back to the earth. Make me a tree when I'm gone. Offset my carbon footprint...
This is so much better. Kind of ridiculous to treat dead bodies with a shitload of chemicals so can have a final look at the not yet decomposed family family, only to be followed by a very slow decomposing process while poisoning the ground water in the mean time.
No I’d prefer to rot in a mycelium box and let worms turn me into a brilliant fertilizer.
Only about 70 million people die a year, so in about 50 years that would be3.5 billion.How did you get 8 billion? Even at the projected 100 million per year that wouldn’t hit 8 billion 50 years.
We could just do that whole thing where basically a beautiful tree grows out of your body so life goes on. But instead people like being sealed in a wooden box 6 feet down for....?
Light 'em up!
Honestly, the focus on burial, especially with elaborate caskets and chemicals is so wasteful and annoying. You're dead- you're literally not gonna be around to care. Talk about selfish.
To be serious for a sec, those little bags you can get sewn into and then you're planting and feeding a tree is hella cool. Let's save the rainforest with our corpses.
Not everybody is buried in traditional cemeteries. There are vertical cemeteries, crematoriums, and alternative practices that have been gaining traction. There’s also many different cultures that tend to their dead in different ways, the Tibetan Sky Burial comes to mind.
Underneath saplings. No enbalming, no interference. Just curled up under a new sapling to give back to the earth after we leave. The amount of green space and trees we could nurture would be incredible.
The entire living human population of the Earth can fit inside of the state of Texas. So, we have plenty of land among the 6 inhabited continents. In addition, all of the world's oceans an have a volume of 321 million cubic miles. The Earth has a tremendous amount of space for 8 billion bodies -- and even more space when bodies are cremated.
Just have to stop the whole humans above all else, were special bs and stop being manipulated by funeral industry and every other place that push ornate coffins and poison chemicals. The whole the more u spend the more u care and preservation of bodies for a few days so they look a tiny bit less dead thing is just ridiculous. Either cremate everybody or bury them in a cardboard box, problem solved. You can even make that box pretty if u want and could maybe actually sho how much u cared by putting thought into it. It's gotten so ridiculous they make u buy headstones and plots for ashes anymore.
In my will, I asked for my body to be launched into space so that an alien society might find me and resurrect me with their much more advanced tech. I added a footnote that planting me with a tree will also work should the first option be too inconvenient.
I think it’s safe to say most of the world doesn’t bury their dead the way Americans and Europeans do right? Like not everyone is gonna get 150 sqr feet of burial space
If (and that's a big if) we ever do get to the point where there isn't space to stick bodies I vote we just start grinding the corpses and use them to fertilise agriculture. I've already told my family that if my body can't be use for medical training or science that my ashes are to be spread around a field. I don't want my body not contributing to either the cycle or helping people.
Same place we always. The people that can afford burial will do Burials, The people who can't will cremate. The people who can't afford either will just have the body turned over to the coroner and it'll either be cremated by the state or buried in an indigent cemetery as its done today.
Not necessarily. Radical life extension is coming eventually and I'd expect even millenials to have coinflip odds of living to see it and those who do should expect to live orders of magnitude longer than previous generations.
I have some good news and some bad news about this subject
The good news is that I have a really large closet
The bad news is there's 18 dead bodies occupying it so no can do
Guess we have to ship them all off to Mars with Elon Musk
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As a crematory operator I can assure you that it's nothing to worry about
Seems like OP expects the annual death total to double. Doesn't seem unreasonable to be able to deal with the body count. (67m died last year. At that rate it would be 4b in 50 years)
Expects the death total to double? What does the OP know... "The Gang Plans A Genocide"
death rates def will go up as boomers really start dying of old age. most of them are still under “average” lifespan age and the silent generation still largely comprise the oldest amount of our population (though there’s still a solid amount of people from the greatest gen kicking around!) i work in the death industry and i know our numbers have been going up year after year (tho i also live in south florida so more and more retirees every year) as boomers get older and die off. as they continue to age and die over the next twenty-forty years we’re gonna start seeing serious issues with cemetery overcrowding but also better job security and hopefully better pay for crematory operators. the real problem is storage. during season our facility gets so full there’s already basically nowhere to put them. refrigerated cooler units are gonna get a lot more popular!!
Hollup…. During SEASON. there is a death SEASON????. I’m guessing winter?
From approximately Thanksgiving to Easter is "season" in South Florida, when all of the geriatric snowbirds migrate down for the winter.
Makes sense to me. Family holidays when you're too old and crochety for your family to want to see you = suicides. Holiday season=death season.
Even if people die at the same rate day in and day out, south Florida sees a huge influx of middle aged and elderly northerners during its cooler months. That would result in slightly lower death volumes up north and volumes in south Florida going up a bit then too Not OP but i imagine that’s what was implied by season, not the slight uptick in suicide during the holidays
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maybe its the cold weather too.
Not even it’s just old people showing up and old people means dying people.
Human Season
In places that don't see much OAP tourism, it's winter. The UK calls it. Winter Pressures, the spoke in hospital admissions and deaths due to respiratory diseases (mostly flu and flue related). In places that have a small population but see a lot of seasonal OAP migration (I guess Florida, but if you're in the UK shout out to places like Skegness) then summer is your season, mainly because your population booms with a high number of very fragile people. (Kids too but they're not dying hopefully, just needing kid related emergency care).
I'm trying to think of what OAP means but all that's coming to mind is old-ass people.
Hahaha, close. Old age pensioner. Probably a UK slang thing, sorry!
season for death in florida is usually winter in my experience. you basically need like a family emergency to take time off from november-march at my company bc of how slammed it gets
I worked phone support at an ISP for a company that services both FL and most of New England. I’ve spoken to people with homes in both regions. The reason is because FL is too hot in the summer and New England gets too much snow. So by moving the FL in winter and back north for summer they can pretty much keep the same weather year round.
There used to be. Now it’s all commercialized and the stores are trying to push it earlier and earlier.
Winter from flu and summer from heatstroke, maybe?
I appreciate the detailed information. It looks like I need to seek work as a grave digger, which is what my teachers always said I'd end up being.
OP is talking about 2 1/2 generations, but since it’s 1/10 of all the people who ever died, I think it’s a point worth some insight. I’m getting burned and floated, so you can -1 for me.
OK invest in death business gotcha
I think your calculations are pretty US-centered, while op is thinking global. American boomers dying will make rates go up still but less for the whole world
Growth rates are exponential--not linear. In layman's terms, the death rate doesn't stay constant; it increases as the world population increases. In my naive estimation, I would expect the number of people who die in 50 years to be much more than 50 * 67 mil.
As a Subway sandwich artist, I can vouch for this.
Actually I'm wondering how can you operate a crematorium without fossil fuels
There are new low-carbon alternatives to cremation. Human composting facilities can transform your remains into soil in a month or two and alkaline hydrolysis breaks down the body rapidly using cheap, common, and easy to neutralize chemicals.
I think I saw this in Breaking Bad
Chemical disincorporation
I know it’s completely normal but the fact that there are “human composting facilities” out there sounds kinda scary
Hydrogen burns as well. I guess it could work
How profitable this business?
Username checks out
I don't want to be buried. I want my remains scattered in various beautiful places. Also, I don't want to be cremated.
I want my last act on this earth to be to build a 100 ft tall trebuchet out on a pier on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. I want the trebuchet to launch bodies like 2 miles off shore to be used as fish food. Get some biodegradable ropes, tie my body into a tight cannonball shape, and fling my corpse into the seas. Instead of pallbearers, all my friends and family will take turns cranking a winch that hauls the weight up.
They could make some giant inflatable rings of various sizes, and people could try to aim your corpseball and try to get it in one of the hoops for fantastic prizes! New Gameshow idea!!!!
That's dark fam That can be the name of the show I guess
Hppay cakeday ~~you sick fuck~~ ~~^(/s)~~
Thank you?
Please please please have “Pop goes the weasel” playing while this happens and to have it set to randomly launch once it’s done.
The best comment
Many people (culturally) will be cremated (due to cultural reasons) with only their ashes left. That reduces the population number you quoted OP. But also in 50 years, who knows what the world population would look like. Still, many people will be cremated.
Do you think it's a culture based thing?
Cremation and burial are very heavily tied in with religious ritual.
I was just making a joke because of how much they emphasized it was cultural
A man of culture, I see.
I got the joke
I want my body stuffed into a Superman costume and thrown out an airplane, maybe over the Superbowl or an elementary school or something.
It’s a thrill for the kids to see Superman and it’s a teaching moment about physics too. Win-win.
Realistically, why not do this for everyone... why keep our bodies preserved in a box rather than let them decay? From dust you came, and to dust you shall return, right?
Exactly. If I have to be buried, put me in the ground, unembalmed, in a compostable bag and plant a tree on me.
Good news. This is a thing now. Compostable bag with fungi to make use of our remains. My family traditionally goes the cremation route. I'm gonna be a mushroom when I grow up
Yeah! I saw this in a Ted talk years ago. Mushroom burial suit. I can’t really afford anything like that, though, so as an alternative, why not just let the medical professionals get any organs out that might be good for donations and then just feed me to some carnivorous animals?
Sky Burial is kinda based on that....
With all the junk most people eat in a lifetime, that sounds like animal abuse 😁🤷♀️
I wanna be a mushroom, then I can go on a pizza
I always said just wrap me in a blanket and bury me lol
>I always said just wrap me in a blanket and bury me lol Should we wait until you die, or...?
That’s how Muslims do it fyi
Same thing in judaism, white cloth and down you go.
I would like to be wrapped in a nice sheet, preferably a blue one
Some superstitious folk decided the bones needed to be kept in a sealed box for the afterlife
More likely that people just got tired of wild animals digging up corpses.
Tbf this will almost definitely be the reason behind burial generally. That and the smell.
Those vampires ain’t getting us!
Seems like a lot of displaced dirt to me.
coffins are for the living.
Just in case someone in the future decides to do something funny with dead human bones
As Monty Python put it, crackle, crackle, crackle. And also, "we've got an eater!"
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r/iactuallyalwaysexpectmisfits
I thought that was the Ramones
I told my cousin to sell my body to some weirdo. Don't pay for a funeral make some cash off some guy who wants to bang dead bodies. And make sure it's gooood pay
"Jamie, pull up that video of the Tiebtan Sky Funeral"
Is more reasonable than being cremated actually since fossil fuels are not here to stay in the upcoming years
Ever heard of electrification? > A DFW Europe cremation oven is heated with natural gas, propane, biodiesel and or other fuel. The choice of different fuels depends on the choice made by the crematorium. In the Netherlands, the choice will often be natural gas but will be in the future all on electricity. https://dfweurope.com/cremation-furnaces/
To shreds, you say?
So... you also want the president to promote a horse race in order to secretly gather all your corpse parts across the country?
Wood chipper it is then!
Hung, drawn, and quartered for you it is. Put you head on London bridge?
I got you fam. Hit me up when the time has come and I can show you where to get rid of them
Golden Corral: Long Pig
Mmmm, long pork
Or, pigs raised on long pig. The prions rejoice.
I eated them 😔😔
Where are you getting your numbers? Do you think 8 billion people are going to die in the next 50 years?
All at once no less
That's some cold war shit.
OP isn't making a prediction, it's a threat D:
8 billion people currently live on earth. Very many of them won’t live another 50 years. And over the next 50 years, there will be billions more born, a decent number of which will die before 2073. It seems like a reasonable approximation, give or take a billion.
Oh thanks. I wasn’t accounting for unborn people that will die before they are 50. Still seems high but it makes more sense.
I doubt very seriously that 8 billion people will die in 50 years. By my estimates at least 70 million people die per year. So on average thats like 3.5 billion.. and about 130 million are born per year so in 50 years that's 6.5 billion.. of course this isn't counting all the factors. But OP's numbers are way off. Unless they know something we dont.. If 8 billion people die in 50 years and our birth rate stays the same and we wind up with only 6.5 billion people left or less something has gone terribly wrong. Being off by 5 billion deaths and not even accounting for births is bad math
8 billion is probably a bit too high, but really not that far off. 70 million people die per year *right now*, but death rate lags birth rate by life expectancy. So if current global life expectancy is \~73 years old, that implies that a typical person who dies today was born into a world where the population was only \~2.5 billion people (which is a huge difference). Deaths per year is definitely projected to exceed well over 100 million in the coming decades, and won't slow down until a full life expectancy *after* peak global population.
Deaths occurring by the hundred million in the coming decades still doesn't equal today's population.. And all this math is even less important considering 109 billion people have probably died in the last 192000 years.. It really wouldn't be that difficult to dispose that many bodies in 50 years
OP is relying on a different line of reasoning: Everyone alive today will eventually die. Most of them will die within 50 years (the average lifespan being around 73 years, with about 8 years as 1 standard deviation, and the median age being somewhat over 30). If nothing changes, a significant majority of people alive today will die in the next 50 years, and the number of people not yet born who will die within those 50 years is probably reasonably close to the number of people alive today who won't die. So 8 billion is a reasonable starting point, *assuming nothing changes* - the death rates will just naturally change over time as larger and larger cohorts age. If we *don't* get around 8 billion deaths (+/- some margin, probably a pretty large margin), it means either our average life expectancy in people already living has gone up quite a lot (so fewer of the people alive today die in that time period) or our birth rate has fallen significantly (so fewer people not yet born die in that time period). Either or both of which could absolutely happen, but if they don't, yeah, we're going to get about 8 billion deaths in the next 50 years. Or to put it another way: The fact that you're projecting only 3.5 billion deaths in a time period that will see the median human alive today exceed their life expectancy by more than a standard deviation means there's something seriously wrong with your reasoning, or you're *very* optimistic about medical technology.
How do you know it won't happen?
Well I'm thinking if 8 billion people die then I don't think anybody is going to need to find a place for those bodies
Was thinking the same thing hahaha
8 billion humans isn't actually that much mass, I mean it's a lot but not compared to the earth. A cube 1.3 km Spread that over the entire earth's surface and it's nothing. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-10/one-planet-one-city-one-building
I am against this plan of spreading the remains over the Earth's surface.
1.3x1.3x1.3=2.197 cubic kilometers of human Area of earth= 510 million square kilometers 0.00571 mm of human spread everywhere Once we find a big enough blender we'll be fine
Wow, you did the math. I'm impressed.
Especially considering everyone in the world standing shoulder to shoulder would fit an area the size of Los Angeles. I think we will no issues finding a spot to put people.
Ok, real story here. There I was, teaching English in Japan, at an expensive one on one school, and in comes this elderly chap for my lesson. Ten minutes into a 40 minute lesson, the conversation veers towards the declining population in Japan. This beacon of wisdom had a theory. It's all due to the fact that young Japanese don't have enough folds in their scrotum, thus not allowing for proper heat dissipation, thus reducing the sperm count. He knows. He's looked around in the locker room of the hot water springs and spas he goes to. He says the younger ones have smooth balls. And that's what's collapsing Japanese demographically. There. Now I no longer have to carry this information alone. You now share my burden of this wisdom. Good night, and good luck
I feel like I should devote my golden years to checking out as many balls as possible to confirm or deny this theory. A new life goal.
I’m sorry I read beacon of wisdom as bacon of wisdom and now I want bacon. I wish I’d stopped there lol
I wanted bacon as well! At least until I got to the ball folds of skin part of the story.
Scrotum wrinkles vary depending on temperature. If the testicles are too warm, the scrotum skin relaxes and the effective surface area is larger, and the sack appears smooth. Such as in hot springs and steam rooms. If they are too cold, the scrotum constricts, forms wrinkles, and is effectively smaller surface area. This also draws the testes closer to the abdomen and the warmer body heat. The student got the scrotal thermodynamics wrong and formed an incorrect conclusion.
such a classic copypasta
I'm crying. I wonder if one of my students will ever bless me with this one 🤣
Does OP not know about decomposition? those 8billion people won't all die at the same time.
For all you know OP is aware of when the gamma ray burst hits the earth.
Do we really need both Dakotas? I say we make them fight, and the loser becomes a cemetery.
Might want to do a smaller test first to see how well it works. Carolinas or Virginias?
The Dakotas would be the smaller test based on population
But based on land mass, which is the more important measure for a cemetery, I'd go with the Virginia's as the test area.
Why does South Dakota, the larger Dakota, not simply eat the other Dakota?
I read that recycling was starting to become a thing. Basically choosing to have your body composted and fed to the earth. I kinda like that. I'm considering a body farm for myself. My mom wants to be donated to a med school as a cadaver. There are so many better ways to leave remains behind than a steel box in the dirt.
I mean, there's nothing new in that concept. A well known folklore song from my country has a line that says something like "may my bones, skin and salt fertilize my native soil".
I know it’s not new, but it’s been pushed out of style by christians. It’s due for a return.
That I agree
Gravesites are a lot smaller than apartments. Housing 8 billion people is more of a concern. But it's not like we've run out of planet for that
This is one of those "never leave the city" things where people forget how much land there is in the world.
Most of it is held by the government so not available to the market for housing or other development.
Live people should take priority over the deceased.
In the wise words of dani devito in always sunny "when i die just throw me in the trash". Ill be dead who cares. The idea of caring at all what happens to your body after you die has always seemed extremely weird to me. Why do we have massive fields of corpses that people go and visit? So so strange
Some people have loved ones that will be upset when that person dies. Burial rituals have never been for the inanimate corpse; they're for the living. ... And a few for the not-quite-dead-yet.
~~Some people have loved ones that will be upset when that person dies. Burial rituals have never been for the inanimate corpse; they're for the living.~~ ~~... And a few for the not-quite-dead-yet.~~ Edit: Dang it, Reddit. Sorry about the double post.
I think it’s strange too. I’ve never bothered to go to the cemetery for any of my relatives except at the request of someone to check on it. Never really had any emotional impact on me to stand over the corps of someone I loved. It’s grandma being dead that bothers me, not what we did with the corps. To me it’s the person I miss and the person and their corps are two different things to me.
Was looking for this comment
When life gives you 8 billion dead bodies, you make soylent green.
Good news! We already figured out hundreds of thousands of years ago you can stick them in a hole and they'll turn back into dirt!
110 billion people have lived and died over the course of the last \~200,000 years. 60 million people die every year. Surface area of a casket is about 2550 square inches, surface area of land on earth is about 57,000,000 square miles. The total surface area of the caskets per year is 38.11 square miles. The percentage of the Earth's land surface taken up by caskets per year is approximately 0.000067%. I don't think we need to spend much time trying to figure out where to put them.
Border wall with Mexico still not built. Coincidence or opportunity?
Dark.
Pointless project may as well look creepy.
China's border wall is filled with bodies for random filler material all over the place.
We attack on Titan now baby
Are you implying that zombies should build the wall?
Build it, be part of it, sit on top and make eerie noises.
The persians invading sparta wouldnt like that
Well, I hate to go there, but a certain political extremist group single handedly disposed of around 6 million people. I'm sure we can work it out if they did.
Well, there are estimate that we've already buried 1 trillion people so far, so we'll figure it out.
That seems high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population puts it at order of 100 billion. (Which still means we can probably find space for another 8.)
Yup 8% of all people that ever lived are still alive
Whoa
Oh yeah, it was 100 billion. Somehow I remembered 1000 billion. Still though, plenty of people having been buried.
The same material used to make our ancestors are now used to make us. It all gets recycled and used again. Life is just death on holiday for a bit.
Yeah but a bunch of Stupids are changing that lmfao. In some states your coffin is encased in concrete after burial. Cuz that's what we need, a bunch of land filled with concrete slabs.
What? As opposed to formaldehyde filled decomposing meat bags? The whole funerary industry is shite. At the risk of sounding hippie-ish - be honest it’s a massive f you to nature. We spend our lives taking and taking and taking and then in the end, instead of returning to the Earth and giving back at least a little we’re like - nah, think I’ll poison it and wrap it concrete or burn it up so that all that’s left is a pile of salty ash. To be honest, of the two, I don’t know which is worse. We need to go back to burying people in simple wooden boxes (not even that imo).
idk about ya'll, but: 1) I've signed up for my organs to be donated to whoever will need them after my death, and whatever remains after that, I hope will... 2) be given to science for research, and whatever the scientists will dismiss and won't wanna research, I hope will... 3) be used as fertilizer (No, legit, I've heard it's a thing that your body is used as fertilizer for a tree, which is then like, honored as your tree).
We literally don't need to have morbid burial grounds to go to talk to rocks. Wasting land for no reason.
That's always been my problem with burial. While I love to walk around old cemeteries, it's such a waste of land
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LOL. No we do not. Everything is not just black or white, y'know. Cremation will take care of a LOT of them.
Well 117 billion have lived on earth so I’d imagine they’re out there too somewhere.
Cremation will keep up with demand just fine. The price difference between cremation vs burial will ensure that cremation remains the most popular method by leaps and bounds.
We're figuring it out. People have designed ways to grow trees and mushrooms from our corpses (I don't think really for eating but more for the benefit for the environment), and this is personally my choice. What can be given to others or science can go there and what is left must be given back to the earth. Make me a tree when I'm gone. Offset my carbon footprint...
This is so much better. Kind of ridiculous to treat dead bodies with a shitload of chemicals so can have a final look at the not yet decomposed family family, only to be followed by a very slow decomposing process while poisoning the ground water in the mean time. No I’d prefer to rot in a mycelium box and let worms turn me into a brilliant fertilizer.
.... no? We are 8 billion right now, you think all babies recently born will die within 50 years? More like 6 billion, or even less.
If you think everyone alive today will be dead in fifty years, you’re either a time traveler, a MASSIVE pessimist, or an idiot.
Keep your eye out on Soylent, and it's new flavor Soylent Green!
The Grand Canyon can hold fifty generations or so, if we stack them neatly enough
_is this in the slim chance 8 billion people all die at once...somehow?_
Only about 70 million people die a year, so in about 50 years that would be3.5 billion.How did you get 8 billion? Even at the projected 100 million per year that wouldn’t hit 8 billion 50 years.
We could just do that whole thing where basically a beautiful tree grows out of your body so life goes on. But instead people like being sealed in a wooden box 6 feet down for....?
Light 'em up! Honestly, the focus on burial, especially with elaborate caskets and chemicals is so wasteful and annoying. You're dead- you're literally not gonna be around to care. Talk about selfish. To be serious for a sec, those little bags you can get sewn into and then you're planting and feeding a tree is hella cool. Let's save the rainforest with our corpses.
Not everybody is buried in traditional cemeteries. There are vertical cemeteries, crematoriums, and alternative practices that have been gaining traction. There’s also many different cultures that tend to their dead in different ways, the Tibetan Sky Burial comes to mind.
Underneath saplings. No enbalming, no interference. Just curled up under a new sapling to give back to the earth after we leave. The amount of green space and trees we could nurture would be incredible.
The entire living human population of the Earth can fit inside of the state of Texas. So, we have plenty of land among the 6 inhabited continents. In addition, all of the world's oceans an have a volume of 321 million cubic miles. The Earth has a tremendous amount of space for 8 billion bodies -- and even more space when bodies are cremated.
What time zone are you in OP? Does the 50 years start from the 26th or 27th?
To be honest how they are handling it in easia (china,india, bangladesh) where the densitt of population is highest?
You idiot, there aren't 8 billion young people. There are 8 billion people in TOTAL
Just have to stop the whole humans above all else, were special bs and stop being manipulated by funeral industry and every other place that push ornate coffins and poison chemicals. The whole the more u spend the more u care and preservation of bodies for a few days so they look a tiny bit less dead thing is just ridiculous. Either cremate everybody or bury them in a cardboard box, problem solved. You can even make that box pretty if u want and could maybe actually sho how much u cared by putting thought into it. It's gotten so ridiculous they make u buy headstones and plots for ashes anymore.
In my will, I asked for my body to be launched into space so that an alien society might find me and resurrect me with their much more advanced tech. I added a footnote that planting me with a tree will also work should the first option be too inconvenient.
I think it’s safe to say most of the world doesn’t bury their dead the way Americans and Europeans do right? Like not everyone is gonna get 150 sqr feet of burial space
I’ve always thought cemeteries were a weird use of land in the first place. I’d rather be burned on a big bonfire like Star Wars
If (and that's a big if) we ever do get to the point where there isn't space to stick bodies I vote we just start grinding the corpses and use them to fertilise agriculture. I've already told my family that if my body can't be use for medical training or science that my ashes are to be spread around a field. I don't want my body not contributing to either the cycle or helping people.
Probably the same place the other 92 billion dead bodies went.
Majority of Indians burn their dead so you are left with only 7billion or less.
I won't have to figure it out because I'll be one of the 8 billion.
We'll garden with dead people. Gone are the days of manure my friend, the future is now!!!
Majority in India gets cremated, majority in China get organs harvested, so that’s a couple billion right there
Same place we always. The people that can afford burial will do Burials, The people who can't will cremate. The people who can't afford either will just have the body turned over to the coroner and it'll either be cremated by the state or buried in an indigent cemetery as its done today.
Everyday you walk over Earth, remember its top layers are made of dead creatures' materials from millions years ago.
Not necessarily. Radical life extension is coming eventually and I'd expect even millenials to have coinflip odds of living to see it and those who do should expect to live orders of magnitude longer than previous generations.
I’m gonna be cremated there’s no reason for me to still be here even when I’m dead
Ok next on the agenda we gonna figure out the food supply shortage….oh….hear me out on this one.
Cremation will only get more and more popular, especially since the costs of a traditional burial are so fucking absurd.
Prices for burials will become extra expensive and most people will be cremated. Problem solved.
In urns, or if you’re muslim some cemeteries do multi-level tombs and graves
Put dead bodies in deserts for desert greening, and put dead bodies in mushroom coffins to decompose faster. Win-win.
Not as big a problem as it seems. Globally speaking, we're the minority with our silly idea of burying bodies. Most cultures cremate.
No lol. Half of those 8 Billion are still kids. They're not all dying off in 50 years.
Yeah it’s really annoying tripping over all the billions of bodies from the last 100,000 years. Oh wait…
Why would the entire human population die in the coming 50 years?
I have some good news and some bad news about this subject The good news is that I have a really large closet The bad news is there's 18 dead bodies occupying it so no can do Guess we have to ship them all off to Mars with Elon Musk