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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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im not justifying this billionaires attempt to claim the moon, but the moon doesn't really have an ecosystem to interrupt, so remains in and of themselves aren't really the issue, moreso the billionaires implicitly claiming it, i think
The moon, like most things, should be treated as a commons. Very few people give a shit about the ashes of one single person, but opening the floodgates to enclosing one of the last remaining commons that have ever been walked as capitalists claim all they can is something that benefits only those capitalists, to the detriment of the rest of us as we need to watch whatever bespoke advertisements are put on the Lunar Billboards in the future.
That and the moon itself is a sort of artifact in the loose sense, one of a handful of cultural touchstones that connects to concrete, objective features of our universe and yet is shared even by ancient cultures that have no knowledge of each other. There's going to be some amount of "defacing" in the process of lunar missions regardless, but at least that "defacing" is for the purpose of exploring and understanding the moon, and not just a dumb vanity project that steals from every future generation to benefit a wealthy lump of charcoal.
Again I really don’t want to respond here because I think I’ll end up saying worse stuff, but this specifically raises a question about what we should do on this earth. I think the same principles hold true for earthen terrain and unless we’re going to violently suppress burials we would need to expand graveyards and stuff. I unironically am all for violently suppressing regular burial, unironically, and just using cremation ashes as compost to manage the quantity, but I feel like maybe you or others wouldn’t like that that much. I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, I think you’re correct and everyone is right that the moon should both be respected and left as unmarred by human hands as possible, I just think that it raises interesting questions about how we should handle burials on earth.
I don’t think someone wanting it alone justifies silly things like this if they hurt people and especially if they deface things that are important to and sacred to others, but if we can find out how to do similarly silly stuff without hurting anyone or anything I think it would be worth doing, but I am starting to question if that’s true, too. Edit: No, I think doing silly stuff is kind of important to the human race, but that doesn’t justify space imperialism/disrespecting native peoples, just means that our theoretical communist utopia will have different, probably much cooler, “wasteful” stuff
Edit: New suggestion for the sci-fi communist future: We make a new moon out of human ashes after collecting enough. I think that would be metal as fuck.
Some of the points I made about the moon only really hold for landmarks specifically on Earth, with the moon as sort of a trans-geographic landmark. I do think we should avoid burying people in the Grand Canyon and things like that for a similar reason, they are part of our cultural heritage and don't need to have corpses piled on top of them.
Being merely a stretch of field with no particular significance is not the same thing and it does not pose the same problem, though burial universally poses the issue that our space is finite and we should really be seeking to optimize it for those who are alive and those yet to live rather than those who have already stopped living. Not that we should be digging up grave sites, but we can eventually stop expanding them for the most part.
So yeah, I think we agree, humanity should move on to cremation (and other practices like sky burial) should become near-universal, with possible exceptions for bodies that are specifically worth studying being preserved to facilitate that study, along with the general supply of cadavers for med students, etc.
As a final elaboration to add a bit of optimism, I think that burial generally wouldn't need to be "violently suppressed", because if cremation is what is normalized and there aren't really avenues for securing a gravesite like is conventional today in the US, people will just go with what is available to them and only a scant, scant few will be trying to pull off reverse-heists to illicitly bury someone, since they know such a body can just be exhumed and thus that they would probably be undergoing significant risk to make what is functionally a very poor grave.
Edit Thinking about this issue, I was reminded of a poem:
Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye
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