Due to a power issue, it looks like the lander may now no longer have sufficient fuel to make a controlled landing on the moon. This was the lander that was set to carry human remains to the moon despite objections from the Navajo nation. Hopefully, this discourages any future attempts at such a stunt, since instead of a permanent mausoleum your ashes may instead be stranded in orbit or scattered amongst the moon dust if the thing crashes.
Put my body on a Musk Bazinga Rocket that explodes on the launch pad shooting debris up to a mile away killing five.
Sabotaged by a brave hero I hope, keep your remains on your own damn space rock.
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.
I think the same principles hold true for earthen terrain
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
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
::: spoiler
anybody who wants to put ashes on the moon should themselves be immediately cremated and their ashes tossed into a campsite portapotty. fuck you
ok sorry, I can tell it was wrong
Edit: At risk of seeming like a smug bitch I do think being cremated and put into waste wouldn’t be the worst, it would literally return me as part of the natural cycle which could be cool as fuck. It would be cooler than being buried on celestial bodies 9 times out of 10, actually (that last 1 is for if climate change somehow manages to sterilize all soil on Earth and reduces it to a mars-like husk of its former self).
Yeah but it skips the (IMO, I know it’s very subjective) gross decomposition phase. No worms eating your flesh, just going straight to insects and plants and microbes feasting on your direct nutrients.
If we want to punish people after they die I think we should plasticize their body like we did with Lenin (though we did that to him out of honor instead) and stick them in a memorial of their evil deeds.
Edit: but returning them to the earth, though more than they deserve, at least sort of erases them from existence entirely.
wait so it would be morally wrong to get my ashes railgunned onto the moon? Because that's the coolest way I can think of for my corpse to be disposed of
What's the point of being buried or spreading your ashes in a place that your loved ones can't visit? Even if you have your ashes cast into the ocean they revisit said shore.
They're for the benefit of the living, a method to process grief and pain.
I think HST benefitted while living from the knowledge he would be shot out of a cannon. Some religious people can derive comfort from having a ready plot in hallowed ground.
So I guess still for the living, but that can include the living person to be disposed of somehow
yeah, this is why people choose their method of burial rather than us just choosing randomly after they die every time
Which i think we can all agree is fucked, right? People should be able to choose how their corpse is disposed of, as a right
Bold of you to dictate how people are allowed to think about death
I don't think the dead are getting much out of it.
That doesn't mean we should be uncritical of such rituals, as though coping mechanisms themselves are fully unassailable. Whatever pathology results in someone thinking being smeared on the face of the moon is the best option can be soothed much more cheaply by means that don't involve actually smearing them on the face of the moon, such as therapy.
I don’t feel comfortable responding, I feel like I’ll say more bad things
What's the point of being buried or spreading your ashes in a place that your loved ones can't visit? Even if you have your ashes cast into the ocean they revisit said shore.
They can visit it by looking up any time
Eventually, everyone will forget me. The knowledge that I'm going to have an awesome death ritual is more important to me than a legacy that will die anyways- Though, of course, I do care about my future loved one's happiness, too
1.) I predicted this response. It's corny as fuck.
2.) Regardless, not a worthwhile use of money. If you have that much money, then it should be taken away from you as opposed to it being used levying the intense energy needed to move mass over such a great distance for a frankly trivial vanity.
I predicted this response. It's corny as fuck.
??? OK wtf kind of
is this. this isn't a fighting game where predicting what i'll say will let you counter it like some sort of Super Smash Bros character?im not defending the yeeting of a rich fuck's corpse at the moon for it to stay preserved in a creepy-as-fuck mausoleum for eternity, just talking about theoretical space ash scattering, which yeah would probably be unsustainable over an extended period (which is why we should shoot people into the sun instead)
I didn't want to acknowledge it before you brought it up since I thought it was such a silly thing to say, and honestly didn't think you would continue the hypothetical in that direction.
my point is that, while i can understand the moon as an important religious site for indigenous people and that should be respected, that should be the reason we don't do stuff like do corpse disposal on it, NOT because it's "useless" or "pointless" (which ultimately could be extended to be said of pretty much ANYTHING we do for our own personal satisfaction now which ends up meaning nothing later on)
That's fair, although I do think that it's immoral to be wasteful when the known costs of an endeavor so greatly outstrips the realizable utility.
I think it isn’t really possible to measure usefulness vs cost in a solid objective way, so it’s probably best to just say it’s wasteful until we achieve global communism, at which point we’ll make the sun cannon a globally available utility
In the liberal economy we have, we can compare the cost of such an endeavor to the cost of other endeavors -- building hospitals or whatever -- and then consider the respective likely outcomes and ask "Which is preferable?" Wasting money on some stupid vanity project that defaces the last clean surface people get to see is made all the more egregious by the ravages of poverty that we can see down on Earth, and pontificating about "what is the point of anything, rlly?" is just a crass deflection from that fact.
Yeah and I’m not justifying the weirdo rich man sending rocket debris into space
I wasn’t trying to deflect from anything, what the rich person is doing is dumb. They’re instating an actual physical claim on the planet which is idiotic in every way.
I’m so confused, I thought everyone was pretty much on board with the idea that space burials were cool, just not like, worth violating indigenous beliefs over cool. I guess because i think having my ashes being in space would be cool I should… Kill myself? Stuff like this makes me worried I’m a legitimately bad person. I don’t know if I just stumbled into a liberal ideology pit or people think I have a different take than I do and whenever this happens it’s insanely stressful. I really don’t want to deface anything important to people, and I agree that the moon should be everyone’s and not able to be claimed by rich assholes. I DO think having my ashes be buried on the moon would be cool but that’s obviously not possible to do without hurting actual people or setting a bad precedent. I understand that and I have been educated there. I have obviously been a massive liberal and still are.
Edit: oh
In Das Kapital they have a whole chapter about how space burials are the 13th form of liberalism. /s
You're not a bad person for thinking space burials are cool lmao. Personally I think putting anything on the moon that's not strictly necessary should be held off. Maybe in the future when there's cities on the moon it won't mattet if you spread some ashes, but I think keeping it pristine is good for now.
Firing ashes off into the sun sounds dope tho. like I don't think there's anything wrong with it other than it possibly being wasteful. but hey since we're fantasy land maybe in the future space cannons are cheaper than ubers.
What? I’m not even defending the rich dude. Get off my ass
Edit: I guess I’ll go… Kill my self? I don’t know what even happened but I don’t feel comfortable in my own skin anymore, I’m scared, I really don’t want to disrespect anyone, especially indigenous peoples. I would rather die and have my remains dumped in a porta potty than live knowing I hurt people like that.
Edit 2: oh
the only space memorials allowed should be tributes to the goodest pup Laika
I only recently realized Laika became such "A Thing" for Red Scare reasons. Long before Laika, the macaque named Albert was killed by the US Space program, and the subsequent primates who -- having been denied the dignity of being called something beyond version numbers -- were named Albert II - V, all either died in transit or, in II's case, on impact with the Earth (I think V burnt up on re-entry, but I'm not sure). It was only with Yorick ("Albert VI") that one actually got to breath Earth's air after reaching space, which took place after a pair of Soviet dogs survived their return.
Not that Laika's case wasn't sad, but I think it's comparatively overblown to talk about the Cruel Soviets.
Edit: I feel obliged to acknowledge the irony that the one named Yorick survived where all his predecessors died.
honestly didn't know that. Another thing I've been brainwashed by.
Jesus Christ, maybe we should make a sun cannon to remove nuclear waste and then leave the rest of space alone. We obviously are not good at touching it without cruelty.
Edit: Maybe not even that, we'll probably miss and somehow hit a baby.
Wait so like we also think making theoretical orbiting space memorials in far off planets would be wrong? God I’m woefully uneducated on the subject of space pollution, I’m sorry for having this kind of liberalism everybody. I’ll try to educate myself before I speak next time
I have committed the most horrible version of liberalism and spoke without knowing.
For any fellow cracker saltines that don’t understand the context, the Navajo nation views the moon as sacred in their beliefs and cosmology and ANY form of human remains there is therefore really, really fucked up.
I was really confused why people were so hostile until I looked it up JUST NOW. I assumed, in my infinite white cracker arrogance, that it was merely the claiming of a segment of the moon that was seen as horrific, and not the act of defacing it with human remains in and of itself, which I can now (and should have from the beginning) understand given how it would be like literally throwing human cadavers into a church but at a much, much worse level. Like throwing gore into Heaven level fucked up shit.
I legitimately feel terrible for this and I’m sorry I didn’t do this bare minimum cursory research. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to not connect how all kinds of burial would be equally fucked up, and I’m sorry I was such a liberal at all.
Please forgive me. I really don’t want to hurt anyone or defend this kind of deep disrespect and direct ignorance of what indigenous people have been saying. I will try to do actual research next time before I open my saltine mouth. No one HAS to forgive me, this is something understandable to be permanently angry at me over, I just want to ask anyways.
Why am I even commenting this? Well, partially because I’m an insecure cracker that needs to transmit it’s dumb feelings online for affirmation. Secondly, because it shows I’m not just some
lib trying to le epically own the “OPPRESSIVE, EVUL” indigenous people for my own cynical endsThe moon belongs to everyone; we should resist those who want to turn the cosmos into the playground of the rich. There is no scientific or public value in erecting such a mausoleum with public funds just because a few (presently dead) billionaires thought it would be neat. The fact they could afford to partially fund such a mission just goes to show that they had far too much money to spend in a productive or even recreational fashion: that money should have been expropriated and NASA or any other space program shouldn't need to be servicing such macabre fantasies.
Of course, many cultures across the world have had and continue to have a reverence for the moon along with the earth itself, and turning it into a graveyard for the fanciful rich should be generally offensive.
making use
weasel language. Of course we should allow scientific exploration of the moon. We should not allow private commodification of the moon. You conflate the two like a weasel. There is no utility in allowing rich creeps to dump their corpses on the moon, in fact it just interferes with scientific endeavors.
i dont care, it does not infringe on anyone elses rights to moon
Found the lolbertarian
the difference is also irelevant when the argument is that "the moon belongs to everyone"
Only if your starting assumption is that commons must be privatized and looted, which is a capitalist assumption but one that doesn’t necessarily make any sense. It’s just something you are asserting. Commodification by private entities should not be allowed on public land, think of it like a protected national park. You don’t just get to mine and make theme parks on it because it’s “public”. Likewise, rich fucks don’t just get to treat it as their playground. If they have enough money to waste on polluting and wasting resources then their money should be taxed away from them and put to better uses
no argument here
Then why are you defending this absurd project? You aren't even doing liberal ideology coherently if you (correctly) say that their money should probably just be taken from them if this is what they are spending it on. So what, you acknowledge that this is a socially worthless endeavor such that it would be more pro-social to seize a portion of their assets, and in fact that them trying to do this should be considered a good pretext for such a seizure, and yet simultaneously that the endeavor should but considered sacrosanct?
I am begging you to read any [leftist] critiques of liberal political theory. Literally any. This contains an offhand example that is nonetheless very solid.
'the moon belongs to everyone (but not rich people)' is shitty reasoning
it’s called compensating for inequality of opportunity dumbass
edit:
and i think that '[group] think its bad to put bodies on the moon' [...] is shitty reasoning
it's called compensating for inequality of political power dumbass. We haven't been listening to "[group]" for literally centuries. We have to at least make an attempt to catch up before treating them the same as all the people we already listened to. If it was some random christian denomination you might have a point, but these are people we've been killing en masse for fucking ages. The least we can do is not LITERALLY throw shit at the things important to them.
dehumanising language is cringe
It's called an idiom, concern troll. Sorry, is "troll" too dehumanizing?
i dont care, it does not infringe on anyone elses rights to moon
Actually, giving rich pricks free rein while the rest of us can only watch does indeed infringe on our "rights" to the moon. These things can only be understood collectively, your atomized account is basically just a sophistical way of saying "first come, first served"
personally i think you should consider drinking your own piss garnished with hydrochloric acid
personally i think its disgusting that they arent respecting a random tribe's claim to 14.6 million square miles of land they've never touched
Please tell me you're not American; the irony would be so great you could mine it.
pure 
brain
, wait for it
some random tribe claims to own the moon and that's silly
