Discussion
Four Billion, or why I'd join the Humans.
Spoiler
Four fucking billion.
200,000,000 uploads per year,547,570 uploads per day.
To survive the 20-year period without catastrophic disease outbreaks from rotting remains, we would have to scale corpse disposal as an industrialized sanitation utility like wastewater treatment or garbage collection.
Formaldehyde and other embalming chemicals would become heavily rationed or abandoned entirely, forcing a reliance on immediate disposal. Either colossal mass grave-quarries, or purpose-built industrial furnaces.
The global timber and textile industries could not keep up with the demand for 200 million coffins or burial shrouds a year, so cremations and burials would have to be conducted with as few resources as possible. Mass graves, or mass incinerators.
There would be convoys of trucks going in and out of upload centers, packed to the brim with hollow headed corpses, headed to centralized burn pits or grave-quarries. Upload centers would have to be centralized, maybe 3-4 per country, with underdeveloped countries having none and having to travel for uploading.
Imagine the images of those grave-quarries or towering smokestacks. I'd join the humans the second this insanity begins.
If you think I'm exaggerating the scale here, by 1943, the Nazis had built four massive, industrialized gas chamber and crematoria complexes (Crematoria II, III, IV, and V) at Birkenau. During the mass arrival of Hungarian Jews in mid-1944, the sheer volume of murders completely overwhelmed the physical ovens. To keep up with the thousands of bodies, the official calculated daily capacity of these four buildings combined was 4,416 corpses per day.
Fuel and body fat from previous burnings were used to accelerate the open-air fires. They forced prisoners to dig six massive open-air burning pits behind Crematorium V and reopened older disposal trenches in the nearby woods.
Modern day Germany [83.6 million pop, 1.01% of global pop, 2,015,000 uploads per year proportionally], would have to run an infrastructure greater than theentire built crematoria system of Birkenau24/7, indefinitely, just to handle its own daily national uploads.
Now this is the kind of realistic, logistical media analysis I love. The picture you paint is completely terrifying. And that's just one piece of the pie, that's just dealing with the bodies.
For me, it's a lot of thinking about how massive population hemorrhage like that wild cause most existing public services and economic structures to crumble. If the most profitable portion of humanity all moved online, there would be no profit incentive for companies to waste their resources creating and shipping goods for embodied humans. Everything you can think of, food production, electronic goods, clothing, shipping. Education would be a disaster since the massive majority of academia would've moved online too to stay competitive. The UIs would leave the embodied world and its people in their dust the faster they became. UBI would be a band-aid on a bullet wound. Not to mention, the majority of embodied holdouts would be people who were adults before UI globalization, who would've have grown up with the ideology that accepted and encouraged UI, but the youth, freshly 21 and having grown up in this world, would be the ones uploading. Embodied society would be hemorrhaging their young adults to the cloud, and would lose all hope of holding a sustainable population replacement level. It's just bleak.
Haha thanks. I really picked up the show because of the Caspian plot in season 1. It remindes me of those classic deep web stories and he felt like a mr_outlaw protagonist, maybe that colored my expectations but I was a little disappointed with how lightheartedly the show handled uploads in season 2. It felt like a much more morbid future than was being portrayed.
This gets much worse if there's some failure or need for a maintenance overhaul for a major disposal facility. The bodies would pile up extremely quicky.
This would be even more horrifying IRL because underdeveloped countries without proper infrastructure would undoubtably pile corpses in unprotected mass graves, leading to disease outbreaks from groundwater contamination.
This is assuming a constant rate, which is also optimistic. Some years were probably higher than others. I'd guess that the second or third year would hit 300 million.
While almost 600k sounds insane, its only like 3 times yesterday. And today. And tomorrow.
you're underestimating how significant that is. It's adding onto the existing deaths, and the existing deaths are a rough constant that scales with population. Resource chains do not scale linearly.
There are now way better means/tech to mass dispose bodies than Nazi German ever had. Most dont even include burning.
We cannot produce enough chemicals to dispose of bodies via Hydrolysis. Not that mass corpse-soup vats are any less horrifying.
If you're thinking about composting for biofuel, again, Jesus Christ that's horrifying. Massive human grinders. What the fuck.
but also you need climate-controlled containment while the microbes can do their work. Neither of those things can be massed, you can't throw 10k bodies into an aquamation tank at once. The only viable solution is open air burning pits or mass graves.
This made me realise that they basically could've solved the uploading tech after a couple good UIs had infinite run time and also just improve their scanning tech to be able to actually clone the brain without destroying it. Why didnt they?
That level of mapping is actually being worked on as we speak, I live with someone who is currently writing the algorithms needed to do so non-invasively, it's the focus of her post-doctoral work.
Her current research points to it being highly likely that quantum computing would be required to run models accurately, which is fun serendipity with the show. But the scans themselves can be done with current technology.
If you see uploads as deaths, then yes, this figure does seem horrifying. But don’t forget what humanity gained with the acceptance of UIs and CIs. We advanced centuries in only two decades. Maddy mentions that UI processing allowed scientists to cure most forms of cancer in less than a year. Automated construction technology was one of the first advancements embraced by society as a whole. No doubt material sciences and chemical synthesis also had geometric developments. I imagine alternative energy sources were also discovered, which would either help with the infrastructure you mentioned or helped counterbalance any effects to the environment such industrialization might have. Using UI processing, logistics would be maximized for resource distribution, and the universal basic income meant that scarcity would be a thing of the past. Plus all unused property and land could be repurposed for the betterment of the Earth’s environment. There was an adjustment period initially as the flashbacks indicate, but with the brightest minds and the wealthiest individuals at the forefront of spreading the technology, those issues were likely ironed out before it was embraced on a massive scale.
I deliberately never said deaths in the post. It's just dealing with the logistics of safe corpse disposal. I also never said it was impossible. Running the necessary crematoria wouldn't even be that difficult on a logistical scale. It's just the imagery that I find disturbing, no matter how we do it, we're going to be disposing of huge masses of human biomatter, and there's no non-horrifying way to do that.
So what about limiting how many people can upload at a time? It's ultimately wild tech so what if they made like a wait list for how many people can do upload over a certain period of time?
In “The Hidden Girl and Other Stories” (the book that contains some of the short stories that Pantheon is based on), there’s one story called “Staying Behind” that basically shows what a wasteland Earth would be if most of humanity did upload. It doesn’t go into body disposal but I think that this is an interesting part of the world building - the world would feel so empty. Like imagine walking the streets of a city center and not seeing people. It’s also so wild to me that people choose to upload, not because they’re dying, but because they just, want to. Either way, love this post, good food for thought.
I feel like the teleporter paradox wasnt treated with as much gravity as it deserves. Upload just kills the person and creates a perfect digital clone. There's a point where half the brain is gone and there's nothing compiled on a server. That person is 100% dead. My expectations for this show were colored a bit because I got into it from the season 1 Caspian plot. It felt like a classic deep web story and Caspian felt like a Mr_Outlaw protagonist.
I thought it would go darker than it did, but the UI society and Human society didn't seem bleak at all. Maybe they could have done something with Uploads being more accessible in wealthier countries, so only the empovirshed and the criminal were left behind in large numbers.
Still, great show. If it was live action it would be more widely recognized as one of the best ever made.
It’s partly due to MIST painting society and the timeskip with a cloud-bias and rosy glasses while Maddie and Ellen didn’t get to elaborate more on the negatives of the embodied world as much during the timeskip. Someone else in the thread mentioned “Staying Behind”, one of the short stories from the Hidden Girl, which does go further into all of this, but also, Craig himself wanted the story to be more of a “rainbow mirror”.
It’s a cautionary but optimistic tale on technology, that we should be reasonable and thoughtful in how we integrate it in our lives but if that balance is met great things can be positively achieved with humanity.
The more bleak side of the post-UI embodied world would be amazing to explore but also take away from that rainbow mirror message a smidge. They do tackle inequality and differences of policy with the monument debate and the Humans, or the more negative picture Ellen and Dave paint of the embodied world.
I'm sure there would be ways of mitigating that, especially with UIs that can find a cure to cancer on the job. If I uploaded I would like my body to be "returned to nature" in some way that won't cause issues. Making huge furnaces for body disposal sounds way too inefficient and I have hard time believing it would make the public very happy about it.
Crematoria are the only solution that I see as practical. I went over the others in a response to another guy.
Either that or grave quarries dug into granite mountains so that the rot doesn't seep into the groundwater, which is an issue that arose with real-world mass graves.
The resource issue would be pretty straight forward I think. People would not need to hold funerals requiring embalming and fancy boxes. They’ve done their own sort of “goodbye” before they go for the procedure, so it would be a scan, and dispose immediately. It would be straight burial or cremating. Which leads to its own issues but still.
The 20 year period has 4 billion- so that’s 200mil a year. The current records are 60 ish mil a year, so, on one hand, we’re saving some work because people are choosing to go earlier, if they’re already on the way out, but ultimately adding to it with more.
What’s that new one where they stuff you in a sac and you grow into a tree? Let’s do more of that I guess?
I’m sure there’s a lot of ways we overcome these particular issues.
The real question is what does a person contribute to the environmental load, versus what the consciousness contributes via its data center? If it’s a significant difference whatever the cost of disposal is might end up being worth the reduced human impact
What’s that new one where they stuff you in a sac and you grow into a tree? Let’s do more of that I guess?
I actually didn't know about this, but on some further research, it doesn't seem like a scalable, practical solution. It's still in the development and testing phase, with the need for a pressurized and climate controlled environment. Digging all those individual holes would also be a ton of wasted energy compared to a single mass grave. You also need a lot of potassium hydroxide.
Even if this was scalable and efficient;
Corpse forests.
Colossal autofactoria melding bone and sinew into human seedpods, transported by the dozen and planted in vast, spotted plots. The point of this post is just the imagery of mass corpse disposal.
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u/JuiceBuddyG assume infinite amount of stir-fry 7d ago
Now this is the kind of realistic, logistical media analysis I love. The picture you paint is completely terrifying. And that's just one piece of the pie, that's just dealing with the bodies.