Thoughts & Ideas

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11 January, 2009 (22:34) | Thoughts & Ideas

Taking the thoughts of this old post (talks about keeping buried bodies from decomposing naturally and feeding new growth) a little bit further, I was thinking about the space that bodies and graveyards are consuming.  Certainly with huge population growths, cemeteries have to be filling up, and you don’t build up, you build out.  So, if there is a constant growth of cemeteries, wouldn’t they be the most prominent acreage holder eventually?  Is there a growth in land dedicated to the dead documented anywhere?  Will there be a day when Arlington Cemetery can no longer hold bodies?  What happens then?

If talking about the dead is too morbid, a different but similar question is metals being used in construction.  With the size of our buildings increasing to crazy limits like we’re seeing in Shanghai and Dubai, where is all this metal coming from?  We just keep on creating new stuff, and certainly recycling has helped in recovering metals and such from other items, but i’d be willing to bet our consumption and use of metals far outweighs our cultivated supply.  So, are we digging big holes in the earth, or shearing away layers and creating big spikes in the form of sky scrapers and airplanes?

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