...have my ashes carried away with the wind.
My question is, how could I build a device that sets me on fire after I've knocked myself out with Nitrous Oxide. A timer?
I thought abot Thermite as the the stuff that shall burn me because I'm sure it will get the job done. How much of that would I need so that nothing of me is left?
Help much appreciated.
By my very rough calculations... assuming a 100% transfer of energy (never going to happen) during the
highly exothermic thermite reaction it would take ~36 kgs of Fe/Al thermite
just to boil off the water in a human with a
mass of 80 kgs. And that's before you've reduced the flesh and bone to 'ash'. In all likelyhood you'd need a lot more thermite, exactly how much being dependent on several factors, e.g. if you want your ashes scattered then there's going to be a lot of heat lost due to a lack of confinement, significantly increasing the amount of thermite required. The thermite reaction is also very fast; it typically takes
2 or more hours to fully cremate a human body in a purpose-built kiln, due in part to the high heat capacity of water. Laying an average human on 50kgs of thermit is unlikely to do much more than just burn into that corpse by a few inches and, how to I put this... 'medium rare' cook the rest of it.
If it's scattered ash your after I suggest you just build a good big ol' fashioned funeral pyre, soaked in some accelerant and ignited by a time-delay fuse of your choice.
