re: #34 mmmirele

One of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers novels (Record of a Spaceborn Few) has human composting as a subplot and gives a fairly complete description. The first time I heard of such a thing was in passing in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I read in the 1970s. In an essentially closed society, whether Heinlein’s Luna or Chambers’ Fleet, human composting is a way of not poisoning the earth with embalming fluid or polluting the air with the byproducts of cremation. And it keeps the rare minerals our bodies carry with us in the environment and not dispersed.

Oh yeah, just a reminder—every element above iron on the periodic table of elements was either created via seeding in an asymptotic giant branch stars (s-process) or via supernovae or neutron star mergers (r-process). And of course *everything* started out in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

/sorry, not sorry for waxing rhapsodic about “we are stardust”.

I think the estimate is that we’re the product of a third star, after two lifetimes and explosions.