Will humans have necropolis planets in the future?

Wendy Carter

Wendy Carter

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As people keep dying and being put to rest under the ground, the space that graveyards occupy on Earth will expand ever more. While cremation is a thing, burial in a coffin is an old and still popular tradition that is very unlikely to become obsolete any time soon. And so a thought appeared in my mind - what if Earth of the future will just be a gigantic necropolis, where people no longer live, but rather are buried as a centuries-lasting tradition? Derelict and abandoned due to complete exhaustion of Earth's resources, or maybe deliberately remade into a giant graveyard, as we already have a lot of them on Earth, so that people who wish to partake in an ancient tradition go to Earth, while the rest of humanity uses some other method of funeral that doesn't leave a body to bury to preserve land space for building construction.

There is also a possibility that maybe humanity will turn planets that aren't Earth into these necropolis planets. Take a completely unpopulated planet that is absolutely resourceless and contains unbreatheable gas and make it into something that serves a purpose. Doesn't have to be a planet in Solar system, it can be some planet far away in the very distant future of 52 century.

What are your thoughts on this? Will we have planets dedicated for burial rites in the future or will humanity keep burying their dead on the very planet they live in? Or will they even keep the tradition going far, far into the future and just use cremation instead? I'm quite curious on what you think of this.
 
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Wendy_Carter said:
What are your thoughts on this? Will we have planets dedicated for burial rites in the future or will humanity keep burying their dead on the very planet they live in? Or will they even keep the tradition going far, far into the future and just use cremation instead? I'm quite curious on what you think of this.
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Burying a body in the topsoil is a hangover from Christianity and realistically was never sustainable long term once we started large scale industrial development. In many cases they are now digging up graves after a certain period or once there are no living relatives to claim them due to the rising value of the plot (at least in Europe, i suspect elsewhere where space is not such an issue is is currently cheaper to expand).

In Italy the below is common, alongside traditional graves.

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We'd build graveyards on top of the graveyards, and probably a lot of people would die in their houses which we'd build over just we've been building on top of things for millennia.

But seriously we'd never need a necropolis planet because of the above factors and we can just keep building O'Neill cylinders until we run out of room for them (something like quadrillions of them in one solar system).
 
Maybe in the future we'll have developed some form of resurrection technology that works for people who haven't died of old age and invented something that allows for human immortality as well. This might be what causes Earth to become a necropolis, due to overpopulation based on literally everyone refusing to die.
If people do die, which will happen mainly due to things that can't be fixed (like total obliteration or disintegration), then what's left of them will be buried on earth as a tradition unless the person who died may have specified otherwise.
 
Honestly I just think its sad that prions are a thing, since cannibalism would be so goddamn useful in this situation.

Seriously, what better way to honour your dead then to hold a bigass feast and turn them into a gourmet meal for friends and family alike to chow down on and reminisce about the deceased's life.

No lingering corpse in the ground, no smoke shitting up the air, just a bunch of full bellies
 
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DanteAlighieri said:
Just throw bodies into the sun.
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crocodilian said:
If we have the technology to effortlessly reach other planets, we aren't going to care about dead people, garbage or anything in between because you could dump all of that into the sun.
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While I do agree that it's easy to just dump dead bodies into the Sun or a local equivalent, people might start talking about how "undignified" that would be, and making some sort of "anti-star corpse dumping" movement. People are very touchy and sentimental when it comes to the recently deceased, and just dumping their bodies like garbage might seem disrespectful.

Also, it's possible that a person asks not to be cremated as a last will. While we go against it when it comes to something that is impossible to accomplish, people rather often comply with it.

The latter is very unlikely, since when a policy is enforced by the government that all dead bodies are cremated, you can't really go against it, but the former might actually become a thing if such policy actually becomes reality. We take issue when people exhume corpses for whatever reason (except for re-burial, but even then some people say it's better to let the dead rest), I can't really imagine that dumping dead bodies into stars like a dump truck does garbage will be taken kindly by people.
 
FroggyBoi said:
Maybe in the future we'll have developed some form of resurrection technology that works for people who haven't died of old age and invented something that allows for human immortality as well.
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(X multiplied by 100) where X is the number of planets currently habituated with a maximum value of 4.
Solve for how long human civilization has left once immortality is achieved.

Planned obsolescence in humans is 'working as intended'
 
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Most likely, Soylent Green will become a thing. Or, perhaps 40K's turning people and corpses into cyborg slaves will happen. Whichever it is, future disposal of bodies will be much less wasteful than simply burying or burning them.
That being said, a necropolis planet sounds like an awesome idea for a Sci-Fi story.
 
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You would need to be quite superstitious to send a corpse through space back to earth instead of cremating it
 
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I didn't think I'd see worse than this, today, but then I read your post.



Judge Holden said:
Honestly I just think its sad that prions are a thing, since cannibalism would be so goddamn useful in this situation.

Seriously, what better way to honour your dead then to hold a bigass feast and turn them into a gourmet meal for friends and family alike to chow down on and reminisce about the deceased's life.

No lingering corpse in the ground, no smoke shitting up the air, just a bunch of full bellies
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I'm imagining that image above being a foodie pic, like those people who photograph every meal.
 
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Derelict and abandoned due to complete exhaustion of Earth's resources
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Not going to happen, even though you probably were just waxing poetic. Earth (the nicer parts of it) would just become expensive real estate, the "original birthplace of humanity" that imports whatever unrenewable resources it doesn't have anymore. There will also always be a cycle of agriculture, husbandry and forestry.

A more likelier scenario than 'derelict and abandoned' would be 'humanity goes extinct and the planet lives on' because this hunk of rock is stubborn.
 
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KeyserBroze said:
View attachment 717982

Burying a body in the topsoil is a hangover from Christianity and realistically was never sustainable long term once we started large scale industrial development. In many cases they are now digging up graves after a certain period or once there are no living relatives to claim them due to the rising value of the plot (at least in Europe, i suspect elsewhere where space is not such an issue is is currently cheaper to expand).

In Italy the below is common, alongside traditional graves.

View attachment 717974
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In France most of the time you "rent" a space at cemeteries for 5 to 50 years, some cities offer perpetual concessions but in others it's just not possible. If no-one cares enough to pay to renew it at the end of that duration, the city digs up whatever's left and drops it in the common grave.
 
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Unless some seriously wacky, physics breaking technology gets developed, travel to even our closest planetary neighbors will be exceedingly expensive. Sure some rich assholes will be buried on Mars, but ordinary people aren't going to pay on the order of $40k to launch a corpse to Mars, and that's not including the facilities that would be needed on Mars to do basic upkeep on the cemetery and inter the new bodies. A 'cheap' mars base would cost on the order of a hundreds of billions of dollars.
 
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