To my favorite potato,
fifth week of the year down already, can you believe it? We are back with the consistency in the new month 😁
How have you been? I really enjoyed seeing you and Youngbin together on that radio program. Managed to randomly wake up at 3am to get a short glimpse on it before I fell back asleep with both of your voices and laughter in my ears. It felt so good seeing you two goofing around...may I say it was close to a healing content? Maybe but it definitly made the rest of the week much more bearable😊
Remember the trip with my former professor I mentioned two weeks ago? Yeah...buckle up for some nerdy stuff, you getting extra points for guessing one of my Master degrees😂 And also it might get a bit gruesome and whacky but everyone needs their little niche they are crazy about...so you get to meet mine😄 I kinda want to apologise in advance, just decide for yourself later on.
So where did I end up? To a place in the dunes of the dutch coast, isolated from the immediate surroundings...now the big question: where was this conference that took place in such a place? Well, I was at ESA and gave a talk on the sanctification of hidden ecocycles. ESA?! Yeah...the European Space Agency. More precisely, we were invited to ACT (Advanced Concepts Teams), a multidisciplinary research institution that deals with future technologies, strategies and issues related to space😅 That was name dropping at its finest🙈 Writing about it, makes me realise how crazy that must sound...I just said 'I am going to space ' to most people, totally not cryptic 😂
But back to my talk: what is meant by Sanctification of hidden ecocycles? The background of the whole talk is the mind game of dealing with death and especially the funeral ritual (first subtle hint for the extra points 😉). You are going to get a short summary...just be warned: your defintion of short might differ drastically from mine.
We have three different approaches that can be shown on a timeline: Present, near future and far future. And I hope that the topic is interesting enough to not lose you somewhere in the near future 😄
When we talk about the present and funeral rituals, we are usually talking about astronauts who are trained as soldiers, engineers or scientists by government institutions, aka NASA etc., and are intimately familiar with the risks of their profession. If there is a fatal accident on a mission (let's take the Challenger disaster as an example), this is usually considered a national tragedy and the astronauts are labelled as heroes. Because there are no remains, things of national importance, symbolised in memorials (we talking about large scale ceremonies) as well as national ideology, are used to compensate for this. During history many solutions to this specific problem arose, mostly a psychological problem and religion in any sort has often been involved in solving by reference to the transcendent.
I give you a short breather 😂😂 and break up the text wall by another picture.
Coming to the near future or to be honest it becomes more and more part of our present. Maybe you already got the hint what might be the next step. If you were thinking about space tourism, yeah...you are right😊 Nowadays travelling to space becomes more and more a 'fun activity', an experience for novelty. But fun can become serious. Let's go through some thoughts about it: The more people go to space, the higher the chance of someone dying in space. So there need to be a talk about the aftermath, the possibilities, chances and challenges of potential space funerals.
Are you all right? Do you still follow me? Hang in there, you are already halfway through, from here on it becomes very theoretical and that's what makes it all fun 😉
We are talking about two options: option 1 n<5 and option 2 n>5, n marking the casualties.
Option 1: You are the first ever space tourist (Hello Dennis Tito, I am not talking about you). Everyone is exicted, you are been followed around during your preparations. You go to space, do whatever you had planned and then you die. There might be a chance that your death is comparable to an astronaut's death, not labelled as hero but it is recognised as a national, maybe even international tragedy.
Option 2: Space tourism gets so normal that it becomes a normalcy when someone dies during their vacation. No more memorials or speeches. But what to do with the dead body?
There is limited space in space. There already exists the so called 'Body-Back' program, a research project funded by NASA. I am not making this up 😄 The body will be put into a bag and be placed outside of the ship. Space is cold, so the body would be frozen in no time but you can't really keep the bag there for the rest of the journey. The 'Body-Back' guys came up with the idea of a robotic arm which would shake the bag until the remains are only fine powder.
Remember? Theoretical, fun, a bit gruesome...thought experiment 😂 At this point I feel sorry for you and whoever might also read this.
As gruesome as the thought might be at first but thinking about the reduction of size and weight plus the increase of portability, this might be a first method of disposal in space.
Okay, now we are coming to the popcultural references. Did you watch DUNE? Remember how the Fremen tribe took all the water from the dead bodies cause water loss is like the worst thing that could happen? Now apply this thought to longer space vacation or even for potential future space colonies that need a closed sustainable eco-system☝️
When the dead is dismissed into outer space, their biomass is gone. It's lost for any ecocycle. But what happens, when everything is limited and desperately needed to ensure survival. Not only persons, but every living being and their biomass is vitally necessay which leads one to self-sustaining colonies.
Far future...the end of this excursus is near😄
In a self-sustaining colony every resource is key and nothing can be wasted, but has to be recycled. That's why earth-related ceremonies of funerals cannot be used anymore. So what to do? When going into space into a small scale colony, the ecocycle of decomposing (invisible on earth) becomes visible. This forces people to acknowledge the problem of how to integrate death and dying into an openly visible cycle.
Getting strong Soylent Green vibes here...'It's dead people ', they have to be visibly integrated in everyday life. That may be a plot twist in popluar movies nowadays but it might become reality at some point ♀️
But recycling the dead as recourses poses problems. Now coming back to the sanctification of hidden ecocycles and the problem of not being able to integrate earth-related ceremonies. So there is the need of establishing a new ritual. Think of using most of the body for nutritrion within food production etc. The small part left could be used to fertilize parts of the colony that will be used as oxygen filter. Sprinkling them in a ritualistic way, the area gets sanctify. This being an airfilter makes it vital for the colony. One does not step on dead people. One does also not step on the airfilter. This could then be holy ground, a protected area where no human could interfere and what does people protect from suffocating.
And there you have the sanctification of hidden ecocycles 😄
All this based on a simple paper I had to write as part of a group project 5 years ago 😅 The twists and turns that some abstruse ideas take sometimes...
I promise from next week on there will be light entertainment again 🙈 I know the stuff written above is way off everything here on fancafe but hey, let's switch it up a bit. I don't really get to talk about this topic outside my own bubble and I think it's quite interesting even for outsiders. Just a very complex form of many What ifs and worth sharing it with people 😊
We can go back to cheesy, trivial stuff on another occasion 😉
To round this up, let me give you a fun fact on the go: my professor once gave a talk about whether Jesus died for Klingons too ♀️😄 What do you think?! Did he or didn't he?
His classes were always so much fun, even though we mostly watched Youtube videos to topics related to the seminar and discussed sci-fi films/books. Did you have a classes/professors at university you sometimes think back to? And I don't mean the ones where you were happy when they were cancelled😉
Until next week,
Take care always 💕
-bets
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