RE: The Resurrection
February 6, 2025 at 10:59 pm
(This post was last modified: February 6, 2025 at 11:37 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(February 6, 2025 at 9:54 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:(February 6, 2025 at 1:32 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: My point was about the plausibility of technological advances, not about proving a specific religious claim.
As for resurrection, you can pretty much forget it. A few people have been brought back from nearly dead due to extreme cold after several hours by careful warming, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and some serious voltage. The technique relies on the body shutting down at extreme low temperatures and being preserved by the cold, but odds are very poor even then. It's led to the phrase "They aren't dead until they're warm and dead."
Taking it back to the resurrection myth, well, best you stick with Divine Intervention. As Zebo has already pointed out, your real problem is going to be brain death, although serious damage to all the major organs will also occur pretty quickly. Without those deep cold temperatures that Jerusalem is famous for not having you're pretty much buggered. Brain damage becomes a worry at 2 minutes without oxygen being circulated and is all but guaranteed by 5 minutes. Those tiny neural connections that make you who you are start dying off and you pretty rapidly lose memory/function/the ability to keep your autonomous nervous system running. That stuff is simply irreparable, even by conceivable near-future technologies. There are a few drugs that might improve your window by a few minutes, but not many, and certainly nowhere near enough to fit the story. I have no idea when the major organs start packing it in from oxygen loss, most people are well and truly dead before then, but I wouldn't give it more than an hour before major damage sets in. After days in the tomb, you're looking at rigor mortis starting and ending and you should be well into putrefaction. What's left of the brain at that point would be a nasty-smelling slurry inside the skull.
I appreciate your answer, but I'm not sure focusing on the difficulty of the endeavor addresses the possibility of it. Let me offer one way of simplifying the problem:
Here's a good definition: Life is disequilibrium. What this means is that life is the act of maintaining differentiation from the environment. You maintain a temperature difference, a pressure difference, a concentration difference, and so on, through homeostatic processes. Conversely, you are dead when you are at equilibrium with the environment. So, life is something like an entropy problem. This means that the problem is in principle solvable regardless of complexity.
ps. Since you mentioned brain damage and neural connections, an interesting fact about the human brain is that our neurons have the ability to regenerate their axons (say if you were to sever your optic nerve) but the ability is inhibited by the brain itself. But it raises the question, is there even a difference between resurrecting an individual and healing them? One is wholistic and the other partial, but both achieve something similar—restoration.