If a tunnel boring machine were installed facing downward in a cemetery, you wouldn't need to expand the cemetery

I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

When I die please arrange my remains on the Bonescraper in the essence of a skeletal gargoyle ty
We tried that before and we ended up with ghost Pokémon. Is that what you want?
- Yes
could you imagine a skyscraper of coffins & skeletons collapsing? LOL would be fucking nuts
You want metal as fuck? Check out these dudes and dudettes

https://culturacolectiva.com/en/history/manene-death-ritual-indonesia/
- Holy sh...
Well have you seen some of the catacombs we do have. Skull piles, bone art, all pretty metal right there too. But not a skyscraper metal.
Like this one in Brazil?
- Have a big reservoir at the bottom that collects all the water runoff and uses it for the city water supply.
  
  Bone water. Yummy.

But then you delve too deep and it's balrogs, innit?

Only if the delving is also greedy
- Not wanting to expand the cemetery or build more cemeteries is likely an economic incentive so it could be argued by the balrogs that it was greed.

That's called a mass grave

What are you up to?

What are you up to?

Their knees in bodies. OP needs to start their plan before they drown.
Or a catacomb

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?

Oh yeah and dignity in death blah blah blah

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.

SO WHERE ARE ALL THE BODIES?
- Did you think graves were perpetual?
  
  I'm sorry to bake your noodle on this one, but when you get buried you'll get 6 years tops before the site is recycled for the next person.

They have vertical graves in many places worldwide actually.

Mm yes but these would be fully automated luxury grave space communal resting places.

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.

When I die, I want my body donated to a university astrophysics lab. I'm either going to space or getting blown up trying!

The best is to return the dead to nature.

What do you do with the displaced dirt?

Profit
Fend off the dirt man.
- Is he weak to his own element like Metal Man?
Feed the homeless. /s
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.

Combine this with the worlds deepest goldmine and we have a winner.

Forbidden tiramisu

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.

That’s one heck of a shower thought!

I have always thought it extremely strange that we bury our dead.

edit: i find it even more strange that several people are responding as if this practice is still necessary.

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.
Why let all that meat go to waste?
- i was thinking, "fuel," but whatever
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!

That would create weak concrete in the exact place you absolutely do not want weak concrete.