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Mummies

nanotechnology

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#1 A941

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Posted 16 April 2014 - 01:57 AM


Is it theoretically possible to ressurect an ancient mummy with Nanotechnology?

I mean those which still have their brain, and which was preserved, and didnt start to decay.



#2 Jeoshua

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Posted 16 April 2014 - 02:57 AM

Proper mummification as done in Ancient Egypt (which I imagine you are thinking of) involved removing the brain with a scraper. One cannot just pull the brain out through the nose, so a stick was used and the jelly-like substance of the brain vitrified and drained out of the skull. After that, all organs in the main body cavity were removed and placed in jars. Then strong dessicants (natron salts) were packed around the body and the removed organs, which removed all water from the cells, breaking them wide open, and preserving them.

 

In short: No. They're dead, Jim.


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#3 A941

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Posted 16 April 2014 - 02:50 PM

I didnt mean the egyptioan mummies which had their brains removed, iw rote:

 

I mean those which still have their brain, and which was preserved, and didnt start to decay.

I meant Mummies like the Lady Xin Zhui, or the Mummies from Incan times.

 



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#4 Jeoshua

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Posted 16 April 2014 - 07:07 PM

The American mummies were similarly dried out to those from Egypt, originally by the harsh desert air and later on by intentional means. Their cells are similarly lysed open by this dryness, and their contents spilled and heavilly oxidized and polymerized. Those mummies are also very, very dead, and beyond the reach of all but the most theoretical advanced hypernanotechnology.

 

I'm not sure about Chinese mummies (Xin Zhui is a Chinese name, yes?), but in general, the ancients' ideas of "immortality" aren't compatible with modern science and the idea of revivification.

 

Mumfication served a generally spiritual purpose, preserving the form of the body for immortality, in a time where cells and genetics and nanotechnology were not even dreamed of. They're not going to be brought back any time soon, and if they were it would involve a lot more than just bringing the bodies back to life. You would have to take the genetic material, grow a new clone body, age it properly, and program the mind correctly, assuming time hasn't disconnected all the neurons and that the configuration of the neurons actually matters one damn as far as consciousness and memory goes. And that's assuming quite a lot.

 

What do you think nanotechnology is, anyways?



#5 A941

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Posted 16 April 2014 - 07:25 PM

I think it is about building molecular machines, composed only of a few million atoms, with a "computer", or better call it something that telles em what to do and can be programmed, and a way to manipulate the tiny parts Matter is made of. To order this machines, some which are spezialised for some jobs, others which are more versatile, to do certain things in an area, like building a very simple homogenous macroscopic structure, or a more complex one by breaking down a very complex task or blue print into small and easy steps.

 

So i think it should be possible to repair damaged cells, even dead ones by replacing Lost DNA parts with information found in similar cells, through extrapolation, or "libraries" made for that purpose.

 

All these things are completely or partially possible today, only we dont know how to do them.

Living organisms, Cells use to programm units to do certain tasks, and it works very well.



#6 Jeoshua

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Posted 16 April 2014 - 07:45 PM

Okay I see. Nanotechnology is actually just really small technology. Technically speaking, Teflon is a form of nanotechnology, as are Intel Core processors. What you're talking about is, more specifically, Nanorobitics, and that is something that is still only theoretical. Sure, we can build tiny gears and print out little whatnots, but we haven't really gotten to the point where we can make something like a Drexlerian Assembler (required for Grey Goo scenario).

 

Cells themselves are a good example of a really complex nanorobotics system, just based on an almost purely organic substrate instead of the organometallic systems that we will likely build one day. And when I say "complex", I mean unbelievably, unfathomably complex. A cell which has had its outer wall punctured, has lost all its water, had most of its hydrocarbons dehydrated, and been left in that state for 1000 years to oxidize and have its very molecules fall apart and recombine would be extremely hard to repair, on par with rebuilding a building for which we have no blueprints which was bombed in great antiquity then covered with the desert sands for 1000 years. And then making sure we got the color of the shades correct and placed the graffiti and footprints of all the people who went through the building in the proper places.

 

And we don't understand even the tiniest fraction of the mechanisms involved. And simply copying what remains of the DNA from cell to cell in the hopes that the system would be able to be brought "back online", so to speak, would be a fruitless endeavor. DNA is not a static thing, as various tags are applied to the backbone of the DNA, such as phosphoryl groups, methyl groups, acetyl groups, etc. Basically these seem to act as "compiler flags", if you will, that define what state the system is currently in, and turn various pieces of the DNA's "code" on, or off, or modify it, or mark it as done, or as a place to come back to later, etc. This is not even counting the RNA in the mitochondria, which undergoes similar processes but does not even have the double redundancy of the matched nucleotide groups to use as an error checking mechanism, and can also modify the expression of the DNA in the nucleus through various means.

 

Each cell has a different epigenetic structure than any other cell in the body. A neuron has certain parts of its DNA exposed, others shut down, and still others acting as modifiers for genetic expression. A muscle cell has a different set of DNA than the neuron, or the osteoblast, or the epithelial cell, or the smooth muscle tissue of the heart, which is different from the smooth muscle tissue of the blood vessel, etc ad nauseum.

 

It might be possible to use the raw DNA to seed a viable egg with and create what is basically a clone of the original body, and create a body genetically identical to the original, complete with the proper epigenetic environment. This has been done with sheep and frogs and many other creatures, but experimentation on human genetic material is off limits for moral reasons in most countries. Assuming that is not a problem, it could likely be done in under 10 years time, with the proper funding. That still leaves the problem, however, of the mind.

 

We don't have the foggiest idea of what the human mind is capable of, let alone how it works, what its true substrates are, etc. It is possible that the mind is made up of physical connections between neurons. It is possible that memories are encoded in this way, hardwiring the neurons together. It is also possible that memory only exists as a wave function in the pattern of the communication between cells. It is also possible that memory is actually stored molecularly, with RNA sequences coding directly for memories. It is fully possible that all of these are true, and likewise that none of them are even close. We simply do not know. Assuming we could use some nanorobotics to scan the entire cranial cavity of the mummy, and then use a similar set of nanorobots to rewire the growing brain of the clone and influence its development, we might be able to "force-learn" the mummy-clone into having the same memories and personality traits as the original, or at least substantially similar to the original enough to be a useful copy.

 

All of this is completely theoretical, and at this point, so far beyond our capabilities it is ludicrous to even think of. We don't know the first thing about how any of these systems work, and all of our knowledge as of this point involves poking various chemical "sticks" into the "gears" of this system and seeing how it ends up breaking. Sometimes we hit on a very important gear. Sometimes we find a useful stick that makes other gears work right. But we are, in no way, close to understanding how it all functions as a whole.


Edited by Jeoshua, 16 April 2014 - 07:51 PM.

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#7 Daniel Cooper

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Posted 22 October 2015 - 07:41 PM

The basic problem is that a lot of information that made up that person has been destroyed through various mechanisms.  Once entropy has had it's way, there's no getting that information back.  So, no matter how sophisticated your nanomachine might be, the information needed to reconstruct that person has been lost.

 

 







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