That might make it difficult to visit the remains of a loved one, but I suppose you can just chuck your flowers in the pit and eventually they'll work their way down.
I mean if you want to be maximally efficient about it just find it abandoned open pit mine in the middle of nowhere. You could dump all of the trash and corpses the human race has ever produced in it and barely even scratch the surface. Just one problem.
How the fuck are you going to pay for all the transportation expenses?
I often wondered about that. Humans have been around for 100,000 years or so and we've been putting people in graves for a much smaller portion of that, but it seems we would have an awful lot of graves at this point. But we don't. You don't come across cemeteries very often and when you do they're not enormous.
I think cremation or donation to science should be mandatory. you can still visit a grave, just a smaller urn. or set them free in their favorite spot, turned into a tree, diamond, etc. a 3x6 foot plot of land that is now useless is stupid in my opinion. at least going to science they can learn more and train new talent.
What do they do with it now? OP's death tunnel is being filled back in with dirt and coffins, so there should be 1 coffin's worth of displaced dirt per body, the same as with current burial practices.
Mass grave. But if you mean something like that underground bike storage in the Netherlands, than if could be done and would need expanding every so often or have the tombstones moved somewhere else
Go a step further and install every layer of coffins into I big vertical conveyor belt and you can rotate it around to get the next level once one gets too full.
It's a safe and reliable way to dispose of a corpse that might be diseased, will smell bad as it decomposes, and would certainly attract scavengers if left lying around. The same goes for cremation, it really just depends on local custom.
i feel it necessary to remind you that it's 2024 (CE, not BCE), and you're using a computer to communicate on a global telecommunications network which runs on electricity and digital information.
Leaving a carcass in the wild would attract scavengers and spread disease, which is prevented by inhumation. Cremation is also an option but requires a large amount of fuel. In early and prehistoric cultures, inhumation was the easy option.
Edit: to add to this, I read something on how the first "burials" were just piling rocks on top of the dead body, primarily to ward off scavengers. So, aside from honoring the dead, burial and cremation have a practical purpose as well.
If you think about it it is not strange at all, it is maybe one of the very early things that differentiated us from animals. We have a concept of death and time, future and loss. We mourn our dead. And I strongly believe that all the rituals that we have established are not meant for the dead but in fact serve the living. It is a way to cope with the loss of a person. And with the ever same ways - casket, flowers, music, burying - we give the mourning something to do and get distracted so that they don't lose themselves in the sadness. It feels "right" because it feels familiar, everyone does it this way. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time someone dies. How to cope, and how to get rid of the body? Well, there is a societal playbook for that.
There was a dude here on lemmy who actually specialized in American death rites. I think he stopped using lemmy though because of too much negativity, I think people commenting how stupid it is that we don't just trash our dead on a post was his tipping point. Which is a freaking shame because it sounds like he knew some really fascinating things.
lots of animals mourn their dead, even ritualistically. humans aren't special in that way. not to mention that, even among humans, burying the dead is not the only practice. many cultures practice marine burials (dumping the corpse in a body of water), or, more popularly, cremation. many carry out these manners of disposal with no ritual at all.
Grief and mourning don't necessitate a burial. other manners of corpse disposal can allow those who remain to process grief, and some can even provide a location for family and friends to visit in memorium.
Na, too wasteful. Instead, just cement everyone into one of those concrete arches that tunnel boring machines poop out behind them and turn those corpses into tunnels. You still get to be buried but you're also doing something useful in death!