In the future, your body won’t be buried, you’ll dissolve

Wired:

Potassium hydroxide is being mixed with water heated to 150°C. A biochemical reaction is taking place and the flesh is melting off the bones. Over the course of up to four hours, the strong alkaline base causes everything but the skeleton to break down to the original components that built it: sugar, salt, peptides and amino acids; DNA unzips into its nucleobases, cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine. The body becomes fertiliser and soap, a sterile watery liquid that looks like weak tea. The liquid shoots through a pipe into a holding tank in the opposite corner of the room where it will cool down, be brought down to an acceptable pH for the water treatment plant, and be released down the drain.

Fisher says I can step outside if it all gets too much, but it’s not actually that terrible. The human body, liquefied, smells like steamed clams.

This, Fisher explains, is the future of death.

Unless you have a religious belief against it, is there really a need to have your remains put in a specific spot in the ground? I read a while back about burying people under trees, allowing their remains to fertilize and nourish the tree. I’d love to be buried under an apple tree in Nova Scotia.