Burial or incineration? This dilemma applies not only to your mortal remains, but to all the rubbish you discard throughout life. Incineration promises (but seldom delivers) an immediate output of useful thermal power. Landfill, curiously, also offers energy, but more slowly. Most rubbish dumps slowly evolve methane, from bacterial fermentation of their biochemical content (food residues, paper, disposable nappies and so on). The gas is a major nuisance — it makes old landfill sites hazardous to build on, for example —but there are schemes to exploit it as a fuel.

As a fermenter, says Daedalus, a landfill dump is absurdly big, runs absurdly slowly, and degrades only a tiny fraction of its contents. The organisms that inhabit it are simply not up to the job. To be economic, it should be much smaller, with a much faster throughput. Daedalus recalls the 'extremophile' bacteria found in hot springs, volcanic black smokers and similar thermal and chemical extremes. They perform the most amazing chemistry, and at speeds accelerated by the high temperature. So DREADCO biochemists are now playing with promising extremophiles — swapping their genes around, exposing them to radiation, selecting the survivors of really brutal conditions, and so on — seeking the ideal cultural mix for DREADCO's Extreme Rubbish Fermenter, or ERF. It will challenge the accepted limits of the conditions under which life can survive.

Daedalus cannot guess what those limits will be. He hopes that ERF will operate at 100 °C at least; with luck it will even go superheated. The harsher the conditions, the more types of rubbish will become fermentable. Not only will plastics and other synthetics soften, dissolve and decompose, becoming food for the voracious extremophiles, but even metals may begin to succumb. Only glass and ceramics (of which ERF itself will be made) will remain aloof.

ERF will resemble an intense, high-pressure, giant variant of the garden compost-bin. Rubbish will be rammed into the top, fuel gas will be extracted from peripheral pipes, and the sterile residue, a sort of rusty grit, will emerge at the bottom. It will be self-heating. Its ferocious internal conditions will impose intense evolutionary pressure on the extremophiles inside. They should steadily evolve further, perhaps imitating the way that life itself developed in the hot and chemically aggressive environment of the young Earth.