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In Longyearbyen, Norway it’s illegal to die.
Now, keen viewers will notice that I’ve already talked about this place in HAI #5,
but any good writer knows that if something works once, reuse it to death, sort’ve like
with Family Guy.
Longyearbyen is just so interesting, and, in fact, I should probably just go and film
a video there but, you know, it’s cold.
Longyearbyen is so insanely far north that by going over the North Pole, it’s closer
to Barrow, Alaska than Milan, Italy.
It’s so insanely far north that the sun does not rise for four months in the winter
and it stays up for four months in the summer.
It’s so insanely far north that the average winter temperature has warmed six degrees
in the past 30 years, oh wait, that’s not a very fun fact.
That’s not a very fun fact at all!
For how far north it is, Longyearbyen is a surprisingly large town—over 2000 people
live there.
In fact, there is no larger town further north than Longyearbyen.
Because of this, Longyearbyen has the northernmost university, cell tower, circus, art gallery,
bowling alley, swimming pool, bus station, gas station, commercial airport, department
store, bank, fire station, ATM, Toyota dealership, bar, and kebab restaurant in the world.
It’s a legitimate town, but it’s still 1,200 miles north of Oslo so there are some
quirks.
For one, polar bears live there too and they occasionally eat people, which is bad, so
it’s actually illegal to leave the Longyearbyen area without a gun.
Possibly for related reasons, there’s also a monthly limit to how much alcohol one can
buy at 24 cans of beer, 2 bottles of liquor, and half a bottle of fortified wine.
While local residents carry an “alcohol card” to track their quota, visitors have
to present their airline boarding pass from their arriving flight at the liquor store.
Longyearbyen even bans cats to save the local population of arctic birds.
They just love banning things, but now for the clickbait—dying is illegal in Longyearbyen.
As you can probably tell, Longyearbyen is no beach resort.
The average temperature in February is one degree Fahrenheit so things tend to freeze
and to stay frozen.
In places as cold as Longyearbyen there is what’s known as permafrost.
By splitting this word into two, you can get a sense of what it means.
You see, “perma” means permit me to show you how to put this word into Google so you
can find out that permafrost is where the ground stays below freezing permanently.
While it may rise above freezing above ground, places with permafrost, such as Longyearbyen,
will always be below freezing below ground, which happens to be where you put dead bodies.
The same principle that keeps your chicken nuggets edible for years on end in the freezer
does the same to bodies—not keep them edible, I mean I guess technically, but just… don’t
eat people.
While it may seem pretty great for bodies to not rot away, it’s not.
You see, in 1918 a few people got the flu—about half a billion to be exact—in what came
to be known as the Spanish Flu Pandemic.
Of the up to 100 million individuals who died, 11 were in Longyearbyen so they established
a graveyard that looks like this.
When you put a corpse into a giant underground freezer it turns out that you don’t just
preserve the body, you also preserve the viruses inside the body and so lurking below Longyearbyen
are some of the only active samples of a flu strain that killed 5% of the world’s population,
which is actually quite useful.
Researchers still don’t fully understand why the 1918 flu was so deadly and they don’t
just have samples lying around, so these bodies buried in the arctic permafrost potentially
hold some of the clues that could stop a future global pandemic, but in the meantime, you
really don’t want diseases that could obliterate future civilizations just laying a few feet
underground preserved for eternity, and Longyearbyen agrees, so that’s why death is now illegal
in this small Norwegian town.
If you’re near death, you’re flown down to the mainland to live out your final days
and if you die unexpectedly, well, there’s no space for you here.
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