Clarification: I mean a person who has actually been dead for a while and suddenly they’re alive again
I swear to God Dave if you found the necronomicon again
Either nobody would believe it, or it would be on every screen and headline for a week, before the next news cycle Swiss the attention away.
Depends. Once you’re dead and everything stops working, coming back means dealing with decomposition and a shitton of toxins. Can the system deal with it naturally? What’s the first stuff to go during decay and can the body do without them?
This is what I was thinking. You’d be going around in a partially decayed body, smelling like hell till all your cells could refresh.
She simply goes on with her life.
Yes, I know her, she is well over 80 years old now.
The definition of death is that it is not reversible, so it would mean that the person never was dead in the first place.
Thanks, I’ll keep that take in my pocket for later. “Your honor, you can’t possibly prove that in the future a superintelligence won’t be able to reconstruct enough of the victim’s brain to resurrect them, and hence they aren’t dead and I can’t have committed murder!”.
Get killed because that’s a zombie
Something that nobody seems to have touched upon is the fact that many dead people are embalmed.
If you suddenly came alive again after being embalmed, you’d suddenly become dead again.
Also, post-mortem examinations are not uncommon if the cause of death was not clear. Again this might lead to instant re-death.
Finally, if the cause of death /was/ clear (such as trauma), then again, that may likely result in instant re-death.
While technically true, this really doesn’t change the question. Life is a complex series of chemical reactions; death is what happens when these reactions stop.
Let’s say you die of heart failure. Your heart stops pumping blood. Then the brain stops getting oxygen, due to the lack of blood. Then rigor mortis, and so on. If these aren’t all fixed, you would also re-die immediately (actually, without the brain function being fixed, you would never really be alive again).
The premise assumes that all of that has been addressed by them coming back to life. Adding a few external factors doesn’t change that. If it did, the simple fact that most people are buried and would suffocate would render the point moot. Same for decomposition.
Although cremation would be awfully hard to tackle…
If it happened frequently enough, the government would find a way to tax it.
So frequency equals taxes?
Let’s hope they never start counting all the times you jacked it.
Or took a step, or breath, or blinked.
They would go “Who was elected?” and immediately return to their casket.
I imagine some religious folks would kill them as an affront to their religion or conversely imprisoned in secret government lab for testing.
It would no longer be the world-view destroying event that it would have have been 100 years ago. The moment someone came up with the idea of a matter-energy transporter, we had the idea of how someone could come back from the dead. Today we know exactly how it would be done - we just lack the technology.
I imagine it would be a total ballache for the person https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/03/they-said-i-dont-exist-but-i-am-here-one-womans-battle-to-prove-she-isnt-dead
Nobody would believe it, even if there was a live video feed of the death and the resurrection.
Depending on your definition people actually have come back from the dead. Friend of mine for one. I’m lucky to live in that timeline.
Death is rather difficult to define precisely. If you define it as “the cessation of consciousness,” then you die every night. Every sleep cycle has some portions of minimal brain activity. There’s nobody home for these periods.
We have examples of people being misidentified as dead, who rise either at the hospital, mortuary, or after.
It is speculated this is one of reasons ‘wakes’ were established, just to make sure the loved one was well and truly dead before committing them to earth.
