Due to a power issue, it looks like the lander may now no longer have sufficient fuel to make a controlled landing on the moon. This was the lander that was set to carry human remains to the moon despite objections from the Navajo nation. Hopefully, this discourages any future attempts at such a stunt, since instead of a permanent mausoleum your ashes may instead be stranded in orbit or scattered amongst the moon dust if the thing crashes.
Put my body on a Musk Bazinga Rocket that explodes on the launch pad shooting debris up to a mile away killing five.
Sabotaged by a brave hero I hope, keep your remains on your own damn space rock.
im not justifying this billionaires attempt to claim the moon, but the moon doesn’t really have an ecosystem to interrupt, so remains in and of themselves aren’t really the issue, moreso the billionaires implicitly claiming it, i think
The moon, like most things, should be treated as a commons. Very few people give a shit about the ashes of one single person, but opening the floodgates to enclosing one of the last remaining commons that have ever been walked as capitalists claim all they can is something that benefits only those capitalists, to the detriment of the rest of us as we need to watch whatever bespoke advertisements are put on the Lunar Billboards in the future.
That and the moon itself is a sort of artifact in the loose sense, one of a handful of cultural touchstones that connects to concrete, objective features of our universe and yet is shared even by ancient cultures that have no knowledge of each other. There’s going to be some amount of “defacing” in the process of lunar missions regardless, but at least that “defacing” is for the purpose of exploring and understanding the moon, and not just a dumb vanity project that steals from every future generation to benefit a wealthy lump of charcoal.
Again I really don’t want to respond here because I think I’ll end up saying worse stuff, but this specifically raises a question about what we should do on this earth. I think the same principles hold true for earthen terrain and unless we’re going to violently suppress burials we would need to expand graveyards and stuff. I unironically am all for violently suppressing regular burial, unironically, and just using cremation ashes as compost to manage the quantity, but I feel like maybe you or others wouldn’t like that that much. I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, I think you’re correct and everyone is right that the moon should both be respected and left as unmarred by human hands as possible, I just think that it raises interesting questions about how we should handle burials on earth.
I don’t think someone wanting it alone justifies silly things like this if they hurt people and especially if they deface things that are important to and sacred to others, but if we can find out how to do similarly silly stuff without hurting anyone or anything I think it would be worth doing, but I am starting to question if that’s true, too. Edit: No, I think doing silly stuff is kind of important to the human race, but that doesn’t justify space imperialism/disrespecting native peoples, just means that our theoretical communist utopia will have different, probably much cooler, “wasteful” stuff
Edit: New suggestion for the sci-fi communist future: We make a new moon out of human ashes after collecting enough. I think that would be metal as fuck.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
anybody who wants to put ashes on the moon should themselves be immediately cremated and their ashes tossed into a campsite portapotty. fuck you
ok sorry, I can tell it was wrong
Edit: At risk of seeming like a smug bitch I do think being cremated and put into waste wouldn’t be the worst, it would literally return me as part of the natural cycle which could be cool as fuck. It would be cooler than being buried on celestial bodies 9 times out of 10, actually (that last 1 is for if climate change somehow manages to sterilize all soil on Earth and reduces it to a mars-like husk of its former self).
Yeah but it skips the (IMO, I know it’s very subjective) gross decomposition phase. No worms eating your flesh, just going straight to insects and plants and microbes feasting on your direct nutrients.
If we want to punish people after they die I think we should plasticize their body like we did with Lenin (though we did that to him out of honor instead) and stick them in a memorial of their evil deeds.
Edit: but returning them to the earth, though more than they deserve, at least sort of erases them from existence entirely.
wait so it would be morally wrong to get my ashes railgunned onto the moon? Because that’s the coolest way I can think of for my corpse to be disposed of
What’s the point of being buried or spreading your ashes in a place that your loved ones can’t visit? Even if you have your ashes cast into the ocean they revisit said shore.
They’re for the benefit of the living, a method to process grief and pain.
What’s the point of being buried or spreading your ashes in a place that your loved ones can’t visit? Even if you have your ashes cast into the ocean they revisit said shore.
They can visit it by looking up any time
Eventually, everyone will forget me. The knowledge that I’m going to have an awesome death ritual is more important to me than a legacy that will die anyways- Though, of course, I do care about my future loved one’s happiness, too
1.) I predicted this response. It’s corny as fuck.
2.) Regardless, not a worthwhile use of money. If you have that much money, then it should be taken away from you as opposed to it being used levying the intense energy needed to move mass over such a great distance for a frankly trivial vanity.
