The film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close opens with a monologue that supposes there are more people alive now than have died in the entirety of human history. The character goes on to suggest there will eventually be no place left to bury all the bodies. It set me to thinking about the dead, and the living and the matter that composes us all. For much of early humanity our dead were returned to nature–buried or burned or set to sea or any combination of these things. Few were entombed in such a way that their matter could not escape. Whereas the film wonders whether or not we will have space for the dead, I wonder if all the matter that composes the dead will eventually limit our ability to create the living.
Call it a fool’s postulate, but if matter can neither be created nor destroyed and the Earth’s matter is finite, burying people in the way we do limits the amount of renewable matter that can be used to create life. It doesn’t necessarily mean that eventually we’ll run out of matter–everything being consumed by the human form being locked into these canisters of the dead and stored away like so much dried goods. It means that matter intervening with earth in the form of asteroids and other space debris will at some point become the primary matter component for all earth life.
I suppose that will make future generations aliens to our own planet.