READY, FIRE, AIM: Going Digital When We Die

Facing a rapidly aging population and land scarcity, the Chinese capital is piloting burial spaces with electronic screens instead of headstones…

— from an article on Bloomberg.com, August 15, 2023.

The Chinese capital being Beijing.

The Bloomberg article didn’t explain why people in Beijing are rapidly aging.  Stress, maybe?  Or pollution?

Pagosa Springs has an aging population, as you have probably noticed if you shop at City Market.  Lots of old people, squeezing the avocados.  Or shopping in the ‘Vitamins & Supplements” aisle.

Like Beijing, we have old people.  One thing we don’t have, though, is land scarcity.  You can see undeveloped land, pretty much everywhere you look.  And trees.

Beijing looks very different.

As we can imagine, a plot of undeveloped ground in Beijing will cost you a pretty penny.  (Or a pretty Chinese yuan, as the case may be.)

And due to the lack of undeveloped property, even in the established cemeteries — in a country of 1.4 billion people, some of whom happen to die each year — the average funeral in Beijing costs more than $20,000, and people are spending more than 45% of their average annual salary on them.

But times are changing in Beijing.  For about a third the cost of a traditional plot, you can now save the ashes of your loved one in a large downtown building referred to as Taiziyu Cemetery… in what resembles a bank safe deposit box… within a cozy room with TV screens.   While you are visiting the ‘cemetery’, you can enjoy a digital slide show — including audio and video clips of the person whose ashes you have stored there.

(I use the word “enjoy” for lack of a better term.)

The folks in Beijing may have got this idea from a Japanese columbarium in Tokyo, where you swipe an ID card to light up the particular safe deposit box where your loved one is housed.

Each little box features a glass ‘Buddha’ that lights up when you swipe your card.

Tokyo is, I believe, even more hard-pressed than Beijing, in terms of lacking vacant land.  So people are getting used to living in tight quarters, even when they’re dead.

I don’t imagine Pagosa Springs having a high-tech cemetery, at any time in the near future.

But we might be able to appear slightly more modern, with the simple addition of QR code symbol to our headstones.

If you are not ‘tech savvy’ and a digital death seems unappealing, you might like the end-of-life experience that I found on DesignBoom.com

The “Soul in the Sky” is a steel urn attached to a helium balloon, designed by Italian designer Diego Stefani, meant to circle the globe in a Low Earth Orbit (altitude 900 km.)

The project SOUL IN THE SKY proposes an alternative celebration of the rites of funeral, the concept of funerary urn and a new way of understanding the journey after the death; it is a real trip, physical, urn floats on top of the world and travels in orbit at 900 km altitude, here the urn sending a signal telling the way done and the road still to be done.

Didn’t have a chance to see the Roman Colosseum, the Great Pyramids, and the Taj Mahal while you were alive?  See them from space.

Almost like going to heaven…

Louis Cannon

Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.