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Go to the Afterlife Clean & Green
You are going to die. Chances are good that it’s going to hurt. After you lose your precious life and your thoughts fall out onto the floor the body you spent your whole life maintaining will begin to rot away. Have no fear though, the people who love you will either have you burned to ash or stuck in the ground for all time. That’s the happy ending for you.
It’s hard to look forward to this inevitability but since you’re guaranteed to stop living at some point [GUY.com hopes that it's a long time from now] it might be high time to consider how you want to make your mortality echo in Mother Nature’s woodsy uterus. Perhaps you can truly Go Green.
The United Kingdom’s Ecopod company has a suggestion: Travel through the afterlife in a coffin or urn made from recycled paper. Its good for the world, cheap, less cumbersome, and in general a more efficient way to dissolve everything you are directly into the ground. Note: It’s not going to make your death any better. Your body will have no better chance at resurrection and the creatures of the soil will still eventually discover you and eat you, make babies in you, and relieve themselves all around you but you’ll be doing your part in not clogging up the underground with brass handles and treated wood.
It’s almost like your dead flesh is an urgent letter in a gigantic envelope on its way to infinity.
In fact, this method of burial has a lot in common with the Egyptian practices of old and if there’s one thing those suckers got right it was building pointy places and burying the shit out of people. Egyptians were the Michael Jordans of wrapping dead things and sending them on their way.
More details are available at their website but the idea of coffins made from recycled paper is keen. Really keen.
I don’t like this, not one bit. I know, intellectually, that I should be fine with being part of the life cycle of the earth, and my corpse decomposing in order to provide nutrients to creatures great and small. But no. Not for me. To paraphrase Ali G, I like to think that, yeah, sure, 4/5 people are going to have the “death thing” happen to them. But one out of five? Jah bless, they keep going
Now sure, it’s unlikely that I’ll achieve literal immortality unless I live to see the technological singularity, but still, I feel very strongly that I was not destined to be worm food. My molecules were meant for something far greater than that. Ideally, I’d like to be either frozen till I can be brought back to life, shot off into space, or at the very least entombed and preserved like Alexander III of Macedon, whose body was on display for 600 years in a glass capsule filled with oils and honey
If you’re into the whole “food for insects” trip though, then sure, these paper corpse capsules seems like a fairly eco friendly way to go about it
*If I am launched into space, it’s entirely possible that millions of years in the future my cells will crash land on some distant world and kick start the process of life and evolution. Then, billions of years in the future, alien scholars will be pondering the meaning of life: “Why are we here?” “Where did we come from?”
And the answer will be that they’re there because *I* conceived and willed their existence
Perhaps their religions will worship their creator and offer devotion and prayer to the one who brought life to their planet
Essentially, I will be an alien god. That’s not too shabby a fate, if I do say so myself