Much as I support technological improvements, I'm afraid I'm a bit of a failure as a futurist -- at least, until the future creeps up with me.

But occasionally I'll have an idea which forces me to examine emerging technology, as happened today as I mulled over an especially morbid idea.

None of us likes death and decay, but unless the futurists put a stop to dying -- and in the next few decades -- we're all headed there. As I was driving out in the country today to pick up Puff's ashes ("cremains" is, I believe, the expression), I revisited a morbid idea I had some time ago, and ran head-on into a technological challenge.

A truly rotten, stinking idea for those who just can't let go of their dead, it occurred to me that some of the more neurotic and morbid types might enjoy keeping an eye on the remains of their loved ones after they go into the ground.

An electronic eye, in the form of a webcam in the coffin.

While most of the technology required to accomplish this task is fairly simple (after all, tiny video transmitters are a dime a dozen these days, and they'll transmit just about anywhere), the biggest problem is: how do you get power inside a hermetically sealed casket? I looked into cordless recharging, but it's not suitable for anything this deep in the ground, and as these systems use nearby magnetic fields, you'd have to blast the hell out of the entire area to shoot a charge down through six feet of ground, past the vault, then penetrate the liner and casket. It just isn't practical.

There's some theoretical work (via theories of Nikola Tesla) on wireless transmission of electricity, but the details haven't been worked out, and it's intended for large scale power transmission and thus wildly impractical as a way of charging batteries in an underground funeral plot.

Betavoltaics is better, and it strikes me as the best way to go:

The technology is geared toward applications where power is needed in inaccessible places or under extreme conditions. Since the battery should be able to run reliably for more than 10 years without recharge or replacement, it would be perfect for medical devices like pacemakers, implanted defibrillators, or other implanted devices that would otherwise require surgery to replace or repair. Likewise, deep-space probes or deep-sea sensors, which are beyond the reach of repair, also would benefit from such technology.

Betavoltaics, the method that the new battery uses, has been around for half a century, but its usefulness was limited due to its low energy yields. The new battery technology makes its successful gains by dramatically increasing the surface area where the current is produced. Instead of attempting to invent new, more reactive materials, Fauchet’s team focused on turning the regular material’s flat surface into a three-dimensional one.

Similar to the way solar panels work by catching photons from the sun and turning them into current, the science of betavoltaics uses silicon to capture electrons emitted from a radioactive gas, such as tritium, to form a current. As the electrons strike a special pair of layers called a “p-n junction,” a current results. What’s held these batteries back is the fact that so little current is generated—much less than a conventional solar cell. Part of the problem is that as particles in the tritium gas decay, half of them shoot out in a direction that misses the silicon altogether. It’s analogous to the sun’s rays pouring down onto the ground, but most of the rays are emitted from the sun in every direction other than at the Earth. Fauchet decided that to catch more of the radioactive decay, it would be best not to use a flat collecting surface of silicon, but one with deep pits.

(Via Slashdot.)

Whether there's any market for this sort of thing depends on how many weirdly neurotic, morbidly sick individuals there are.

Edgar Allan Poe, meet the electronic age!

No discussion of this sort would be complete without taking the ancients into consideration. (Indeed, isn't that supposed to be a constant, overarching purpose of this blog?) The Romans were fond of various forms of communing with the dead, and one highly analog method was by pipelines or libation pots connected directly to the deceased:

Similar to inhumation burials, a pipe leading from the container to the surface was often installed to allow libations to be offered to the deceased and the gods.

Inhumation

Around the 2nd century CE, inhumations began to rise in popularity. Urns and mausolea fragments from the Roman period provide evidence of the increasing prevalence of inhumation (burial in a pot, coffin, or vault) rather than cremation. While the upper class was laid to rest in sarcophagi housed in mausoleums, the Roman middle class was usually buried in graves marked with a large upright pot, or amphorae, partially thrust into the ground. This allowed offerings, in the form of libations, to be poured into the grave of the deceased.

In addition to those who can't stop partying, or let go of their deceased, as well as the morbidly preoccupied, there's the not-entirely-unreasonable fear of being buried alive. Over the years, this has caused morbid inventors to come up with analog equivalents more advanced than the Romans' pipelines to the deceased.

Here's a more modern, American, example:

Martin Sheets was a wealthy businessman who lived in Terra Haute, Indiana in the early 1900’s. One of his greatest fears was that of a premature burial. He often dreamt of being awake, but unable to move, at the moment the doctor pronounced him dead and then regaining consciousness while trapped in a coffin below the ground. Sheets decided to fight his fears by investing some of his resources in the prevention of his being buried alive.

First of all, he had a casket custom-designed with latches fitted on the inside. In this way, should he be placed inside prematurely, he would be able to open the coffin and escape. He also began construction on a mausoleum so that when he died, or was thought to have died, he would not be imprisoned under six feet of dirt. The mausoleum was well built and attractive but Sheets realized that even if he did manage to escape from his casket, he would still be trapped inside of a stone prison.

He came up with another clever idea. He installed a telephone inside of the tomb with a direct line to the main office of the cemetery. In this way, he could summon help by simply lifting the receiver. The line was fitted with an automatic indicator light so that even if no words were spoken, the light would come on in the office and help would soon be on the way.

Death came for Martin Sheets in 1910 and he was entombed in the mausoleum. I would imagine that for several days afterward, cemetery staff workers kept a close eye on the telephone indicator light in the office. After more time passed though, it was probably forgotten. Years went by and the telephone system in the area changed. Eventually, the direct line to the cemetery office was removed but thanks to very specific instructions in Sheets’ will, and the money to pay for it, the telephone in the mausoleum remained connected and active.

A number of years later, Sheets’ widow also passed away. She was discovered one day lying on her bed with the telephone clutched in her hand. In fact, she held the receiver so tightly that it had to be pried from her fingers. It was soon learned that she had experienced a severe stroke and family members assumed that she had been trying to call an ambulance when she finally died. A service was held and after a quiet memorial service, she was taken to the family mausoleum, where she would be interred next to her husband.

When cemetery workers entered the mausoleum, they received the shock of their lives. Nothing there was disturbed, they saw, except for one, very chilling item. Martin Sheets’ telephone, locked away for all of these years, was hanging from the wall.... its receiver inexplicably off the hook!

I have no idea whether there would be any legal impediments to this, but I doubt it, because personal objects are commonly placed in coffins with people, and mini-webcams are so small that they could be stuck in there when no one was looking, so it wouldn't even require cooperation of the morticians.

The latter, however, are usually quick to get in on any new death idea. And if one of them sees this post and acts on it, hey, I'm sure I'm not the first person to think about stuff like this, and even if I was, there'd be no way to patent the new use of existing technology.

Alas! It's not a new idea anyway, as I just Googled it and found stuff like this:

Digmeup.com
Web portal for people who have been buried alive with an internet connection in their coffin

If you're going to have an internet connection in your coffin, there should really be somewhere for you to go. This idea stems from the "Be buried with your mobile" and "Internet Connection for Coffins" ideas.

....Rather than a full-blown Internet connection, coffins could just be installed with small, cheap webcams. Then digmeup.com would be a site where hundreds of thousands of webcam images could be viewed. Obviously 99.9999% of these would show corpses, but there might be the occasional picture of someone looking rather panicky. It would be "compulsive browsing" too - you wouldn't want to stop looking through the images for fear that the next one might be someone relying on you to notice that they're alive. The whole thing would of course pay for itself with banner ads.

I know, I know.

Plenty of people would be dying to give it a try...

UPDATE: There may be a problem with the Betavoltaics concept -- not because it wouldn't work but apparently because there are -- guess what? -- regulatory issues relating to the tritium:

...the process is easily reproducible and cheap, says Fauchet -- a necessity if the DEC Cell is to be commercially viable.

The fabrication techniques may be affordable, but the tritium itself -- a byproduct of nuclear power production -- is still more expensive than the lithium in your cell-phone battery. The cost is less of an issue, however, for devices designed specifically to collect hard-to-get data.

Cost is only one reason why Gadeken says he will not pursue the battery-hungry consumer electronics market. Other issues include the regulatory and marketing obstacles posed by powering mass-market devices with radioactive materials and the large battery size that would be required to generate sufficient power. Still, he says, the technology might some day be used as a trickle-recharging device for lithium-ion batteries.