Future shock: Make no bones about it, the disturbing reality of water cremation is the future of death

Perhaps if I had shared her fears with someone, whatever’s left of Nellie Turner wouldn’t now be saturating the soil at Old Monkland Cemetery. Sometimes I have to shake off uninvited visual flashes of the horror taking place inside that coffin – an oak sponge she never intended to soak into for eternity. I recall the congealed, sticky mess stuck to the bottom of the porridge pot that day and shudder.

But relax, dear reader, it’s highly unlikely you’ll experience a similar fate. The UK is fast running out of cemetery space, making burial an outrageously expensive and elaborate luxury, the preserve of well-heeled, modern-day pharaohs like Bono, Elon Musk and Kevin Bridges.

Aside from choosing to be ruled by London, cremation remains Scotland’s most popular way of erasing ourselves from existence. A recent YouGov poll confirmed that 58 per cent of us wish our bodies to be consumed by 1,000°C flames, compared with just 17 per cent preferring to spend the next few billion years rotting in a box until the sun consumes the Earth. Yes, we all end up being cremated in the end anyway.

Presumably the remaining 25 per cent of folk in that survey ticked the box to be blasted off into space from a giant cannon like Hunter S Thompson. But Johnny Depp paid for that – £5 million to be exact. Few Scottish folk could afford such a magnificent send-off. Well, maybe Kevin Bridges. Perhaps his remains will be blasted into space from the roof of the Hydro. No doubt he’ll have been booked to perform there that day anyway.

Cremation wasn’t always so popular – it took a long time to catch on when the process was first industrialised 130 years ago. No concerns over greenhouse gas and mercury emissions back then, of course – just paranoia that Jesus’s powers may not stretch to resurrecting a pile of charred ashes.

With far fewer of us putting faith in eternal life by way of messianic reanimation, perhaps the time is right for the intriguing new option of “water cremation” to grip the popular imagination. It sounds lovely – tranquil, a bit Pagany even – but the process, officially known as alkaline hydrolysis firmly belongs to the modern age. Essentially, a dead body is fed into a machine full of chemicals, liquidised and then flushed away down the nearest drain. Only the deceased’s skeleton is left behind, rendered as crumbly as chalk by the process. Even the tiny hands of Donald Trump will be able crush up the bones of his loved ones. It may be the only way of reducing global carbon emissions the President will approve.

One of the main proponents of water cremation happens to be a Scotsman, biochemist Sandy Sullivan. Presently, his company, Resomation, waits patiently for the process to be made legal in the UK. Despite being approved and popular in 15 US states, flushing folk into the water supply still makes our policymakers a bit queasy. Sullivan insists the process leaves no DNA residue of the individual – and the recent introduction of the new Cremation and Burial Act 2016 in Scotland may soon allow us to adopt this potentially gamechanging method of body disposal. Breaking Bad’s Walter White would be on board, no doubt.

“Water cremation now offers a new, innovative yet dignified approach which uses significantly less energy and emits significantly less greenhouse gasses than flame cremation,” says Sullivan. “We are on the cusp of revolutionising the funeral industry with the chance to provide the public with an environmental alternative at the end of life.”

So what actually happens? Be warned, the following paragraph should not be read as you nibble on your Sunday morning kippers.

Inside a high-pressure chamber, potassium hydroxide is mixed with water and the submerged corpse is heated to 150°C. All flesh melts away with the chemical reaction.

Over the next three hours, everything but the bones breaks down to the most fundamental components – water, salt, peptides and amino acids. All DNA unzips into its base parts – cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine – and what was once a person is now a skeleton floating in a horse’s urine sample. This unholy gloop apparently smells of seafood. The liquid is then blasted through a pipe into a holding tank to cool down, brought down to an acceptable pH for water treatment plants, and then poured down the drain like dishwater.

Perhaps not the way my dear gran would have wanted it. At least if Sullivan’s dreams of a Scottish corpse disposal revolution are stopped by red tape, he can still turn a tidy profit by selling his device on the black market. I’m sure there’s plenty of budding Walter Whites out there thinking of committing the perfect murder.

BIG BROTHER IN SPACE

LOCKED away from reality with only a group of fickle, aspirant egotists for company, wondering which one will stab you in the back next – it’s just another day for we mainstream media monkeys at Herald towers.

Yet, it seems there’s no shortage of folk volunteering to hurl themselves into such an environment. The spit-and-sawdust Mars One project – a crowdfunded collective delusion aiming to colonise the Red Planet with “astronauts” chosen from a Big Brother-style application process – is now preparing to test the top 100 candidates for a one-way trip to certain calamity.

According to CEO Bas Lansdorp, these sacrificial offerings to the sky gods will soon face “indeterminate periods locked up with complete strangers in a test of psychological state”. Married volunteers may sail through this assessment.

“There really is no escape,” warns Lansdorp. “The first crew to make the trip to Mars will have the toughest time. They are on their own and the level of comfort will be very low.”

Well, they are not truly alone. It seems Earth will be watching – with a 12-minute delay – thanks to HD cameras attached to everyone who will star in this most far-out of reality shows.

Mars One’s feverish ambitions were recently torn a new one during an online presentation by two giggling MIT students, who took great pleasure in branding the project even wackier than Pat Sharp’s old Fun House barnet.

Their simple facts and figures nakedly exposed the financial and technological impossibility of Mars One’s pipe dream. But Lansdorp was undeterred, retorting with a willy-waving display of truly unhinged delirium – detailing new plans for floating cities in Venus’ atmosphere.

Even if Mars One’s sticky back plastic rocket blasts off without vaporising the entire crew, Lansdorp has a lot of work to do in one lifetime. If the Mars One crew are somehow guided by God’s own hand and land safely, the CEO insists they will never return to Earth. The inevitable Lord Of The Flies outcome may become reality TV’s ultimate watercooler moment.

As usual, Leonard Cohen warned us: “I’ve seen the future – it is murder.” Martian Manhunters, or whatever this “Big Brother in space” is eventually called, will surely herald the true unravelling of post-Enlightenment moral progress, where slaughter once again becomes entertainment. It’s clear this show will make The Running Man look like The Krypton Factor.

Perhaps such blood-letting voyeurism is a necessary societal pressure valve, our 200-inch TVs functioning as a once and future Colosseum. And by tuning in, we will all be complicit in the delicious irony of technology ushering humanity back to the Dark Ages.