Alas, the auction for the Point No Point Lighthouse has been cancelled. Something about safety requirements of the U.S. Navy.

However, there are some alternatives, for instance, this flippin' ship.


(The FLIP ship in the process of re-organizing its spatial profile. Photos courtesy of the U.S. Navy. Source.)

Known formally as the R/P FLIP, it's a mobile research station used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography principally to “study how sound waves behave under water,” but during its 40 years of operation it has also collected data on the “way water circulates, how storm waves are formed, how seismic waves move, how heat is exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the sound made underwater by marine animals.”

You can see it position itself vertically, as well as the crew, refrigerators, stoves and coffee pots adjusting to the changing spatial configuration, in this short video.

The ship is the only one of its kind, but surely hundreds should be built, each one interning the pulverized remains of the dead. Or housing a single occupant. One could be the family mausoleum of a Greek shipping magnate. Thousands. Tens of thousands.

A not-so-little forest of columbaria bobbing about in the future ice-free waters of an auroral Arctic.

Should their ballast decay and the whole vessel sinks to the bottom of the ocean, it will simply be a return to standard practices.

Or how about floating wind turbines?


(Image by Norsk Hydro.)

This must be where the billion-dollar burial industry enters the potentially billion-dollar green industry.

In the Archives:
On cemeteries