Rituals and festivals in brave new worlds

As I'm writing this blog post on Christmas Day in the UK, my mind is on the topic of rituals and festivals today.  Most of the stories I write are set in the future, and I'm imagining times and places where the cultures, beliefs and values will have changed from today's, perhaps radically.

Humans were burying their dead as early as 300,000 years ago, so it seems likely that we'll go on honouring the dead in some way in the future.  But the rituals we use are likely to change a great deal. We are already cremating bodies on earth instead of burying them like we used to do.  There are too many humans and not enough space for full sized graves these days.  How will that ritual translate when we have populations living on space stations?  There will be even less free space aboard those structures.  Will we have a 'space burial', an adaptation of the burial at sea, where a person's ashes are scattered to the solar wind?

It's said that organised religion arose as a means of providing social and economic stability to large populations.  It served to justify the central authority.  Political power - and the right to collect taxes - was justified by divine sanction.  Think of Egypt's Pharaohs for a classic example.  But it's also said that organised religion arose as a means of keeping the peace between unrelated individuals.  Apparently, the leading cause of death among hunter-gatherers was murder. 

So how will rituals change in the future?  It's likely we'll always mark the major turning points of our lives: birth, coming of age, death.  And we'll probably also continue to celebrate the start of the new year, even though on a space station that year will bear no relation to planetary seasons.

When we live in space we'll have to create completely new ceremonies to fit our changed way of living.  We'll probably always need a calendar for administrative convenience, and with that comes a new year,  and perhaps we'll always need a new year to force us to think about and plan for the future.  Traditionally we make our new year's resolutions and set our goals for the coming year.  We'll still need to do that in the future, and perhaps we'll still need a magic hour at new year to help us believe in our hopes, plans and dreams for the future.

I hope that those of us who still live on planets will continue to celebrate the passing of the seasons in some way.  We will still need the hope at midwinter that the planet will move on in its orbit and the warmth of the summer sun will return.  Some rituals are timeless.