I was walking alongside my friend and we were discussing Tolstoy blog I wrote the other day and we discussed the story of the greedy man who dies after running the whole day to capture as much land as he could. The tartars, or the local clans, laugh at his stupidity as they remark, “how much land does a man need?”
This led to the topic of burial v/s cremation. My friend told me that he would like to be composted after he is gone. I found that weird and made me wonder whether he took his climate change theory too far. I personally think that I would be cremated so that my soul doesn’t linger for too long near the body and moves on, but if I were to be buried, well I would like a unique burial, with an astronomer suit and all and be buried on Mars. Ideally, I would prefer Mars, but if that cannot be done due to cost reasons, Moon would be okay.
I’m rooting for Musk and SpaceX to create a human inhabitable colony there by then and perhaps oldies like me (I will be old by then) can be shipped to another planet, where we can bunker down in our cave and be buried afterwards. I don’t think today’s generation or future generations would go anywhere unless they have a 10G connection and besides, they don’t even need to step outside their home with VR and AR bringing everything to their bedroom. So, it would be people like me, who are not so much into technology who would want to be the guinea pigs and we would be willing to go there. Like Noah took all species in his ship to an unknown land, Musk and Co. could ship us onto the Mars adventure and we could survive there. Also, besides, I will be old, so they need to just stock us with supplies for 10–20 years and send us away without worrying about how to ship supplies back from Earth. We all have seen Martian the movie and we will figure out. If we don’t, then well, you lost a few old people. And our grand kids and children can do a virtual funeral if they chose to. Or they can keep us as a character alive still, given that chatgpt would have probably been trained on each individual’s behavior and you get a chatbot for each person, mimicking their style and behaviors to the fullest.
All of this is only possible if Mr. Musk doesn’t blow away his billions on another expensive twitter buyout. In such a case, I’ve no other chance to root except for Mr. Bezos. But, he probably would have blown away his billions on multiple lame shows on Amazon prime, like Rings of power and then I’m back to square one. I need atleast one of these eccentric billionares to pursue their eccentric dreams of space materialize and materialize at scale. Between Musk and Bezos, I’m rooting for Bezos as he is more “cost-centric” and would probably use the “frugality” leadership principle to make space burial, if not travel affordable. Hey, may be he will make that FREE as part of being a prime member!
And so, the dream will live, if not me in an astronomer suit and then floating for eternity in space with my hand in waving motion and confusing other space travellers on who this mysterious astronomer is, who has been floating in space. May be they will take selfies of mine and post it on Instagram. Or may be there will an avatar in my honor on meta world by then and then my grand kids can visit me and spend time with me. Just need to have Mr. Zuckerberg believe the meta dream and keep pumping billions into those.
All of this can happen or we could get crashed by another astroid and earth blows up and I could still get my wish be fulfilled.
