On a generation ship, how to handle the dead?
One thing that necessarily happens on a generation ship is that people die of old age. Now that poses a tension: On one hand, you need to handle the dead with dignity. On the other hand, you probably cannot afford losing the materials the dead are composed of.
So in short: How would a generation ship responsibly handle the dead?
1 answer
I can see a few methods:
1. Cremation
This is already a popular method of dealing with your body when you've passed on (at least here in the UK). A furnace doesn't take up much space, and especially on a ship where you have huge amounts of power, it certainly won't take up much of it. You could then drop the ashes out into space - one astronomer is doing this with Pluto - but you have to decide whether that's ethical or not: is it polluting the Universe?
2. Cryogenic freezing
We do already have the technology to do this one. When someone dies, you can give them a coffin, a funeral, and then put the coffin in a cryogenic freezing unit until you get to your destination. The big disadvantage of this is that it does take up a lot of space - with that many people on board, you're going to need a big room to keep all these dead people in. And of course, it'll be a lot of work to get them all off the ship when you get to your chosen planet.
3. Sanitary Vacuum Disposal System
Also known as "throwing bodies out into space", this method is the simplest: after the funeral, you stick the body in an airlock and open the outside, thus letting them fly off into space. This might actually appeal to some people because of the almost romantic ideology that your dead relatives are out there somewhere, watching over you - in this case they really are out there. However, this does again have the problem of are you polluting space?
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