Energy from human corpses !
Question:
I think we should not waste human corpses by burying them six feet under. We could turn them oil and soap, could create plastic from them an various other chemicals.
Response:
Soylent Green.
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> I think we should not waste human corpses by burying them six feet > under. > We could turn them oil and soap, could create plastic from them an > various other chemicals.
Response:
Don’t think you can claim originality for this idea. Jeremy Bentham amd Heinrich Himmler come to mind, among others. Even if you could overcome the social stigma of using Granny as feedstock, it really isn’t much of a resource. How many natural deaths daily in a typical city? Maybe a few hundred? And the average mass of human corpse? Maybe 60 kilos? And a large part of the mass of a human body is composed of water, if I remember right. So if you leave the corspe out in the sun to desiccate like a raisin, maybe it nets out to 10 kilos, of which a large part is bone, and not very combustible. I seriously doubt the energy that might be recovered by burning the daily output of corpses in a city would be enough to keep the streetlights lit. Perhaps the notion would best be used as a stalking horse to convince the NIMBYS tha maybe a new nuclear power station isn’t such a bad idea, after all. :>) Gordon Richmond
Response:
Or dog food. <g> —
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> I think we should not waste human corpses by burying them six feet > under. > We could turn them oil and soap, could create plastic from them an > various other chemicals.
Response:
> Soylent Green.
Soylent green is soybeans & green lentals. Karl Johanson
Response:
Youngster, "Soylent Green" (both words are capitalized) is an imaginary product and the title of an 1970′s Sci-Fi movie where Beef was more precious than gold and a jar of strawberry jam can sell for around $150. Food for the common people was made from human corpses by The Soylent Corporation. Original book title was "Make Room! Make Room" written by Harry Harrison (him of The Stainless Steel Rat stories and many others). You can check out a review of the movie here, http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue55/classic.html. Another story that can give you fits is Macroscope by Piers Anthony. He shows a possible future culture that embodies the best and worst that you can imagine of behavior of the individual person. Both of these stories, and many other Sci-Fi stories that deal with a possible future on Earth, touch on many different facets of life as a secondary capacity to the main storyline. These include entertainment, transportation, and energy, among others. Kind of like what we are doing here 
Bob
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> Soylent Green. > Soylent green is soybeans & green lentals. > Karl Johanson
Response:
> > Soylent Green. > Soylent green is soybeans & green lentals. > Karl Johanson > Youngster, "Soylent Green" (both words are capitalized) is an imaginary > product and the title of an 1970′s Sci-Fi movie where Beef was more precious > than gold and a jar of strawberry jam can sell for around $150. Food for the > common people was made from human corpses by The Soylent Corporation. > Original book title was "Make Room! Make Room" written by Harry Harrison
Soylent Green was mentioned in Harrison’s book first. It was soybeans & green lentils. Possibly because the book seems to peter out (leaving the world just stuck with the high population & high population growth and no willingness to make birth control legal again), the movie producers decided to add the ‘Soylent Green is people’ bit at the end. Rather though, they were throwing corpses into tanks of water at the end. They may have been feeding the output of the tanks (algae, dissolved human cells, whatever) to folks and passing it off as being the Soylent Green most people were eating, but there wouldn’t be enough corpses to feed everyone, so most of it still had to be the soybeans and lentil mix. They may have added some dissolved human cells to the Soylent Green sometimes, to up the protein content, but then you have Soylent Green with added human cells, rather than ‘Soylent Green is people". > (him of The Stainless Steel Rat stories and many others).
I still haven’t read "The Stainless Steel Rat Runs for President". >You can check out > a review of the movie here, http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue55/classic.html.
Saw it when it came out. Read the book a few years later. > Another story that can give you fits is Macroscope by Piers Anthony. He > shows a possible future culture that embodies the best and worst that you > can imagine of behavior of the individual person.
A good story, except for the attempts at justify astrology as a valid school of thought. Read it 11 times. > Both of these stories, and many other Sci-Fi stories that deal with a > possible future on Earth, touch on many different facets of life as a > secondary capacity to the main storyline. These include entertainment, > transportation, and energy, among others.
And unrestrained population growth in a society where birth control is made illegal. >Kind of like what we are doing > here
Quite so. Karl Johanson Editor and science writer: Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine
Response:
I don’t remember the author or the title (after a couple of thousand books they all tend to get jumbled in my head) but a couple of years ago I read a novella where things were made to grow using human parts as fertilizer (ie when you bought a potted geranium, a childs finger (whole) was put in the bottom of the pot.) Farmers dug in whole corpses to get their crops to grow. Nobody in the book seemed to be sure if the soil had lost all it’s natural organic materiel, or if people had become to demanding about growth rates. I also seem to remember that people lost their sex drive and the futur of the human race didn’t look to rosy – to much disinterest. As I remember, at the end of the storey the main characters were going somewhere but stopped in the middle of their journey when they spotted an abandoned cabin on some mountain, where they were going to spend the night and ended up living full time, just out of lack of drive or motivation to do anything else… and that’s how tha human race ended. Nobody was interested enough to do anything to keep humans going. Very frustrating to read! Mel Karl Johanson a
Related Posts