When I die, I want to be stuffed and turned
into a robot on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
You cannot actually do that.
But there are some other awesome things
you can do with your own dead body.
Anthony here for D News, and why just get buried.
That is boring.
And also as the population grows and land becomes more valuable,
getting buried in a cemetery is just sort of wasteful.
There just isn't space for them.
About 76 million Americans will hit life expectancy
in the next 10 years, and it's going
to take a space the size of Las Vegas to bury them all.
There is not room for this kind of stuff.
Even in countries like England, where 70% of the population
is cremated, things are getting tight.
Plus, the human body is full of all kinds
of amazing useful things, so as a public service,
here are the coolest things you can do with your body
instead of burying it.
You've got a lot of carbon in you.
All living things do.
You just so happen to be about 18% to 24% carbon.
So why not get yourself turned into a diamond?
A company like LifeGem will use chemicals
to extract the carbon from your ashes, turn it into graphite,
and then throw it into a chamber that mimics the intense heat
and pressure at the center of the Earth.
And in a couple weeks, boom!
You're a precious gem.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, you already were.
But now you are literally.
So what now?
Well, you could be the ghost inside
of a haunted ring, which is cool.
Or you could potentially be part of an nanoscopic MRI
or a quantum computer.
UC Santa Barbara researchers think
that sheets of synthetic diamonds patterned
with nitrogen atoms could make computers about a million times
more efficient than silicon.
And the atomic impurities of them
might make them the perfect candidate
to be the building block of tiny magnetic field detectors which
could be injected into the human body
to allow us more precise medical scans than ever.
So just get yourself turned into a pile of diamonds,
and send yourself to the nearest college.
Does that sound too pedestrian, too useful?
How about just shooting your ashes into space?
For $2,000, Elysium Space will launch a vial of your cremated
remains off into the final frontier.
The company was founded by an ex-NASA employee,
and the cost includes a mobile app
that will let your loved ones track
your endless voyage to the stars.
But if you want to stay closer to home,
rival company Celestis will put you
on a satellite orbiting the earth for $5,000.
Now some of you might be saying, wait,
if we are trying to save the Earth's resources,
why are we buying into something that takes as much energy
as a spacecraft launch?
To which I say, "Spaaaace!" [FADES AWAY]
But if you're looking to be carbon neutral even in death,
maybe you want to die in Sweden, specifically Halmstad, Sweden.
When locals wondered about the pollution
from the town's crematorium, city officials
came up with a plan.
Using the furnace from the crematorium
to power homes in the town.
Just a tiny, adorable, little power plant run on dead people.
One last way for your Nissan LEAF-driving friends
to show their superiority to you before they
go into the great beyond.
By the way, my idea of being stuffed, that is not legal.
But you can be mummified, though a sarcophagus
is going to take up much more space than a coffin.
The lovely people of Summum will do it for you
for the sum of $67,000.
You know, you would think for that much money,
they can afford a better website.
I am still undecided, other than being an organ donor.
What do you want to do with your body when you die?
Let me know down below.
You can also check out a link to an article from the Discovery
News blog with even more ideas for dead bodies.