What would be the best way to fossilise my body after I die? And would an inscribed gold plate with my epitaph survive a few million years in rock, in case a future archaeologist finds my fossil?
Pat French
Rockhurst, Shropshire, UK
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To turn yourself into a fossil, your burial site needs to be located where you won’t rot away – typically somewhere anaerobic, such as a peat bog or tar pit.
Then, you must arrange a geological sequence that layers sediment above your remains. You will need to accumulate sufficient layers to create pressure that forms sedimentary rock. It is important to arrange these in a way that means minerals can leach through the rock. This will dissolve your bodily tissues and allow the mineral leachate to replace them. Then, you need to ensure that erosion removes enough of the rock above you that you stand a chance of being found. While the gold of your ID tag would survive this, an inscription on it wouldn’t.
Alternatively, you could use the Roman method. Lie in the path of a pyroclastic flow until thoroughly cooked and covered with 5 metres of ash. You would be discovered as a void in the ash and someone would have to fill your void with concrete to recreate your likeness.
Or you could follow the instructions in the New Scientist book How to Fossilise Your Hamster and scale up.
Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK
In order to become a fossil, your body would need to be completely buried immediately after you died. A low-energy environment like a river delta or the bottom of a lake would ensure that your body isn’t disturbed. These surroundings would also need to be very low in oxygen, in order to put your body beyond the reach of microorganisms or animals that could eat or dismember your remains and to halt or delay its chemical decomposition.
Possibly the best place for this would be under the very fine silt of the abyssal plain, which makes up about half of the ocean floor. Burial deeper than half a metre is advisable, so your body is beyond the reach of burrowing creatures like worms. Marine snow – organic debris falling from shallow water above – would then accumulate, increasing the pressure on your body.
You would need at least 200,000 years for fossilisation to work its magic, so you would need to avoid a subduction zone or other geologically active sites. However, there might be a problem relocating your fossilised body – or, worse, a future generation of your family might forget to pass on the knowledge of your fossil’s location.
“To turn yourself into a fossil, you would need at least 200,000 years for the fossilisation process to work its magic”
An alternative strategy might be to collect enough tree resin to become preserved in amber. If you simply want to be conserved, then being launched into outer space or hidden in the permanent shadow of a lunar crater might be an option.
Gold is chemically inert, so a plaque made of it would survive, provided it wasn’t physically abraded. However, the screws used to attach it to the rock might corrode, or the rock itself might chemically weather, so I would be surprised if a plaque were still attached to a rock after a few million years.
Perhaps the best way of being “fossilised” is to pass on your genes and accept that natural selection will modify your genome.
Hillary Shaw
Newport, Shropshire, UK
There are three main problems in turning yourself into a fossil.
The fossilisation process is the first. To accomplish this, just before you die, get into an underground chamber where you can pull a rope to flood the place with anoxic mud. Then you stand a good chance of becoming a well-preserved fossil, complete with your gold identification plate.
Your second problem is whether any sentient being could interpret the words on the gold plate in millions of years time. The use of pictures and symbols like arrows should help overcome this issue.
The biggest problem is where to carry out this fossilisation. You need somewhere that won’t be subducted or buried beneath a new mountain range, ocean or ice sheet, but there are conflicting models of what Earth’s geography will be like millions of years from now. Personally, I would go for the middle of the Canadian Shield, where bits of crust from billions of years ago still persist.
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