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Recycling dead bodies?

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zombiak zombiak's picture
Recycling dead bodies?
Here's some gruesome food for thought for you: would it be possible to take appropriately preserved (but technically dead) biomorphs, for example from a depressurized space vessel or other habitat, and 'refurbish it' for further use by a new ego? When brain death occurs due to suffocation, but there are no microbes responsible for decomposure (for example, in a depressurized vessel or a celestial body more or less stripped of microbial life), the brain and the body should stay reasonably intact - frozen to the bone (probably quite literally), but probably still recoverable. I can imagine groups of bio-scavengers, gravediggers of the transhuman era, taking those bodies onboard their ships, getting rid of the original stacks (or selling egos stored in them), replacing some faulty tissue with vat-grown organs, then placing it in a healing vat to get the juices flowing again and voila - a nice body to sell on the black market as 'salvage'. They could also replace the irreversibly damaged parts of the brain and body with cybernetics, effectively creating a Frankenstein-like pod of some sorts. Transhumans using such morphs would probably be heavily ostracized ("Social Stigma: Lazarus", anyone?), maybe even have a biological equivalent of the 'Lemon' trait since their bodies can still be quite faulty, but it'd be a cheap method for some people to actually have a biological body, so desired in most places. It also could be used by some people to actually recover their own, original bodies and inhabit them again. So, what do you think? Do space Frankensteins/Lazaruses sound plausible enough?
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
I think there are boring
I think there are boring practical and economic reasons against it. Screw those: this is such a wonderfully creepy idea that it should be made to work, if only in some corner of the setting. Obviously "dead" synthmorphs can be repaired and re-used. Pods might also work: they are probably built using standardized tissues, making it fairly easy to transplant parts from one to another a la Frankenstein (they are already nearly there). So at least living pod parts might be worth collecting and bringing to the Doctor. Hmm... a fresh morph that just died because it lost its head should be entirely repairable in a healing vat. New, empty brain to fill with a paying ego. Cryonically frozen bodies might be "empty" (if we assume the suspension technology was not up to scratch and scrambled their brains, or the brains were already mush due to late suspension) - thaw them using modern nanoprotocols and use a healing vat to repair them to full function. Of course, some less nice scavengers might think that the original egos are less worth than new egos (at least they are unlikely to pay better). Natural death is much trickier. The Fall evacuee who dies when his escape pod ruptures first dies from asphyxiation and lung bleeding. Then he is freeze-dried: quickly, but probably not so quickly that no decay happens in the core of the body. And then he is subjected to years of cosmic rays, corresponding to a fairly intense dose of radiation. Not too many viable cells. Still, with nanotech you might replace a lot of that (especially if you use vat-grown replacement pieces, essentially turning them into pods). I would argue that the more extreme cases of "resurrection" are little more than making a morph using the corpse as a mold. But that might still have uses: it has a unique identity, and might even claim to be a continuation of a past self (good for accessing bank accounts). I wonder if there are nanosystems that could be used to make a biologically dead body move? I doubt it would function very well: protein synthesis has stopped, tissues are dissolving, there must be an ATP source to drive muscle activity. But I can totally see somebody making a "zombie medichine" that keeps dead tissue running simply by feeding it energy, but it will not last long before the cells break up. You could inject it into newly dead people to keep them running for a few minutes (perhaps to do a post-mortem interview with somebody lacking stack), or with some nanites growing artificial nerves linked to an AI make a shambling "zombie" for similar short duration use. If you want it around longer you need to replace more and more of the body with nanosystems, ending up with an image in a mold again.
Extropian
nick012000 nick012000's picture
Nope, not doable, or at least
Nope, not doable, or at least, not easily. You'd be better off recycling them for feedstock and growing a whole new body from scratch. Bodies that die in vacuum get freeze-dried and mummified, and then subjected to large radiation doses from cosmic rays; this would render them useless for anything other than feedstock, because of the cellular damage this would cause. Even a recently-killed biomorph will have sustained enough damage to destroy the brain, and since it's the construction of the brain that's primarily responsible for biomorphs taking a year and a half to produce, you'd probably be looking at spending as much time repairing it as you would producing a new one from feedstock.

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zombiak zombiak's picture
I think that getting rid of
I think that getting rid of the cellular damage and replacing the damaged fragments of the brain with cyberware to create a Pod-like morph would be more practical and less silly than regrowing an entire body from a severed head, which is already a thing ;) Obviously, creating Lazarus morphs shouldn't be widespread, easy or even viable in the long term - it should be shady and done with profit in mind, nothing else. Imagine communities in the Outer Rim which can't simply receive a transport of biomorphs overnight, producing them also takes far too long, yet people still want biological bodies. And suddenly, a criminal (?) organization gives them exactly what they want...almost, because they work like an illegal car dealer - salvage a dead morph, quickly fix it in a 'duct tape and bubblegum' kind of manner, and then sell it to willing customers. Or maybe there is a vessel with just a few biomorphs onboard, but one of them dies in an accident; the inhabitant can be restored from a backup, but there's no spare body for him while they desperately need it to run another EVA and fix their ship...so they try to ressurect the dead. The morphs should be faulty, possibily requiring an equivalent of Genetic Service Packs sold to indentures on Mars to keep their bodies in one piece (as described in Sunward), but that's the point - a biomorph for the desperate. And creepy as hell.
nerdnumber1 nerdnumber1's picture
I too am in the "cool, but
I too am in the "cool, but impractical" pool. There is a very narrow range of damage where a body is dead-dead yet whole enough for repair to be economically viable, hard vaccuum of space and extended irradiation is definitely in the "too damaged" camp. In rare cases, I could see this process being viable. If you have a fresh bio-morph corpse (like organ-donor fresh), and lack the time, equipment, know-how, or licenses (in the case of high-end biomorphs) to make a similarly high-end morph, you might be able to stitch together other fresh-parts, fab/salvage some important bits, and use a healing vat or more crude machines to make a workable pod-morph. One might even replace a damaged meat brain with a cyberbrain. The morph will likely be sub-par and difficult to maintain, but if you can turn your slain fury into something slightly better than a worker-pod with limited resource, you might just be forced to deal until the mission is over. I think it might be more likely that a person would choose to create and sleeve in a Lazarus morph for personal, rather than pragmatic/economic, reasons. Perhaps someone finds an attachment to their original physical body that a clone-body won't fill, and refuse to discard it even in death (many religions find importance in how their remains are handled, and some modern religions won't even allow blood transfusions). Alternatively, one might have an interest in death or undeath. Future goths actually can be walking corpses. Also, I could see some deathless gang enforcers being pretty creepy.
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
I think that there was a Penn
I think that there was a Penn & Teller Bullshit! episode (I think it was season 2 episode 9 "Death, inc") that focused on the topic on the dead and what people do with them. They had a segment on cryostasis. The episode said that the bullshit on cryostasis was that there were people who claimed they could freeze people so they can later be revived and cured with more advanced technology later down the road. The problem and reality was is that being frozen tends to destroy proteins and damage other structures. Unfreezing such a body would create a messy gooey glob of organic materials as the body it came from would have long lost most of its structural integrity. Whatever cryostasis tech that Eclipse Phase uses would have had to get around this problem (probably by preventative means). It would be very hard to fix a body that was frozen before such tech was possible. If it were possible to fix such damage, it would likely be possible to print up new bodies quickly instead of waiting years to grow new ones. I don't know how being frozen in space would be different, but I seriously doubt that any body would last long in the vacuum of space without some technological aid (such as medichines). Even with technological aid, chances are the damage will continue to add up over time making such revived morphs less and less viable. In regards to needing a spare body to do something asap, I doubt that few habitats would be without nanofabs to create Case morphs, or spare robots for remote controlling (or being modified to include a cyberbrain). Without such things, a habitat would need a good reason why it still functions. One of the few things going for biomorphs is that basic biomods do enable organic bodies to regenerate, so the odds of regenerating fully is higher.
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
DivineWrath wrote:I think
DivineWrath wrote:
I think that there was a Penn & Teller Bullshit! episode (I think it was season 2 episode 9 "Death, inc") that focused on the topic on the dead and what people do with them. They had a segment on cryostasis. The episode said that the bullshit on cryostasis was that there were people who claimed they could freeze people so they can later be revived and cured with more advanced technology later down the road. The problem and reality was is that being frozen tends to destroy proteins and damage other structures. Unfreezing such a body would create a messy gooey glob of organic materials as the body it came from would have long lost most of its structural integrity.
That is the sloppy argument against cryonics; in reality various cryoprotectants are used to prevent ice crystal formation so that cell membranes do not break. But as cryonics people will tell you, just because the microstructure doesn't look too bad doesn't mean it actually is viable. Some of the demonstrations of successfully transplanted frozen organs show that at least some tissue is definitely viable, but how that scales is a matter of debate. Still, it is worth remembering that Suda did get electrical activity from crudely frozen and thawed cat brains back in the 60s. My own worry is that g-proteins will decouple before molecular mobility is removed; again we don't know for certain yet. The short of it: cryonics is better than it is made out to be. But we don't know if it is good enough.
Extropian
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Arenamontanus wrote:That is
Arenamontanus wrote:
That is the sloppy argument against cryonics;...
My bad. I suppose I should have did some fact checking before blurting what I've seen, read, or heard. I'm kinda busy as of late so I apologize for my sloppiness. By the way, are you familiar with Penn & Teller Bullshit! ? Some days they make some interesting points but in others they challenge beliefs that seem beyond reasonable doubt. I'm wondering where you think they are in terms of accuracy, asking right questions, and backing up their claims. What do you think of them? By the way, this is an open question for anyone else to answer too.
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
No problem, I just like to
No problem, I just like to hit that particular canard every time I get a chance. I usually bring it up myself when being interviewed about my cryonics contract. No direct experience with Penn & Teller. I have heard good things about them, but not watched. Generally, improving people's critical thinking is good - doing it accurately is even better, but one can never be perfect. Going back to EP, maybe a good new thread: untrue things a lot of people in EP believe. What are the superstitions, flaky taboos and sheer misunderstandings that come up? Maybe some people still demand morph bloodgroups matching their personalities, or think that it is bad luck passing asteroids on the left side of their angular momentum axis?
Extropian
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Back to the main topic:
Back to the main topic: undead. I think turning a dead body into a temporary or permanent morph is wonderfully creepy. Suppose you infiltrate the tissue with nano-actuators, essentially adding a fullerene actuator mesh along muscle fibers and linking it to an artificial nervous system. Replace the brain with a cyberbrain, and the senses you want with cybernetics. Voila, your own zombie body! I can imagine a large gang or some group acquiring the tech from some warped nanohacker. Take a body, inject the zombification nanites, let them grow a few hours, insert a cyberbrain, wait for the "Hello, wor...BRAINS!" handshake message from the system, and download a favoured or disfavoured member into the new morph. It is a somewhat crappy synthmorph, but does it ever have a high intimidation bonus! It doesn't bleed, it doesn't feel pain (unless you really didn't like the downloaded ego), it doesn't breathe, and it still looks like the original (at least for a short while) so you can use it for infiltration or terror - send a fork in the body of the killed guy back to his gang, have him get into HQ, go berserk and then blow himself up in the most gruesome way possible. The main limitation is likely energy: running a body takes several tens of Watts, so you probably need to inject a litre of "zombie juice" (some kind of ATP-like solution full of chemical energy) at regular intervals or it will deanimate. A cool thing with this morph is that it likely will not show up as a biomorph on scanners (not enough body heat, no heartbeat) and not as a synthmorph (too little artificial materials). Smart observers will soon figure it out, but who has the time when the dead are returning?
Extropian
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Just realized who would
Just realized who would *totally* do this: Nine Lives. Voudoun. Soul-trading. Ruthless criminals. The drums in the background are a low-bandwidth subsonic control and command channel for the zombie botnet.
Extropian
nick012000 nick012000's picture
Arenamontanus wrote:I think
Arenamontanus wrote:
I think turning a dead body into a temporary or permanent morph is wonderfully creepy. Suppose you infiltrate the tissue with nano-actuators, essentially adding a fullerene actuator mesh along muscle fibers and linking it to an artificial nervous system. Replace the brain with a cyberbrain, and the senses you want with cybernetics. Voila, your own zombie body!
Even pods take six months to grow, because you still need some brain matter to interfact with the cyberbrain. The fact of the matter is, despite how "wonderfully creepy" creating ressurrected zombie morphs might be, it's just not feasible with the technology possessed by the transhumans in Eclipse Phase. Brains take too long to grow, and everything else too little. If you do the math, growing the rest of the body takes [i]2%[/i] of the time to create a new biomorph, and 8% of a pod; you really are better off recycling dead biomorphs into feedstock to grow a new one.

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Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
nick012000 wrote:
nick012000 wrote:
Even pods take six months to grow, because you still need some brain matter to interfact with the cyberbrain. The fact of the matter is, despite how "wonderfully creepy" creating ressurrected zombie morphs might be, it's just not feasible with the technology possessed by the transhumans in Eclipse Phase. Brains take too long to grow, and everything else too little. If you do the math, growing the rest of the body takes [i]2%[/i] of the time to create a new biomorph, and 8% of a pod; you really are better off recycling dead biomorphs into feedstock to grow a new one.
I disagree. You are not doing this using biology, but rather by using a specialized protean swarm making actuators, wiring and energy distribution. That sounds totally within standard capabilities. Maybe it is hard to make a cyberbrain out of the mush, sure, but that can be implanted. Yes, if you want a *good* biomorph it will take time. If you instead want a shambling undead, I think it can be done in an afternoon. After all, you could just do taxidermy for heaven's sake, putting actuators under the skin and linking to suitable software. My next criminal character will totally have Art: taxidermy as a skill.
Extropian
Decivre Decivre's picture
DivineWrath wrote:By the way,
DivineWrath wrote:
By the way, are you familiar with Penn & Teller Bullshit! ? Some days they make some interesting points but in others they challenge beliefs that seem beyond reasonable doubt. I'm wondering where you think they are in terms of accuracy, asking right questions, and backing up their claims. What do you think of them? By the way, this is an open question for anyone else to answer too.
I like their show, but Penn & Teller have a blatant political bias that colors every episode. This normally isn't so bad, but it has worked to the detriment of the show's integrity in at least one case. The second-hand smoking episode was released only a few months after the first major studies on second-hand smoke had come out, and since some of them were inconclusive, Penn & Teller let their libertarian bias color their opinion, and they basically stood by the view "if there's no proof it hurts anyone, then there's no problem". Unfortunately, more comprehensive studies came out the same year that showed significant effects of second-hand smoke, they stood behind their episode, stating that the fundamental point they made stood. You should be allowed to smoke if you want, health of others be damned. [i]Note that I'm okay with smoking, but I always feel you should smoke responsibly, in a manner that minimizes exposure to others as much as possible. Or if that's not possible, just don't smoke. No habit should ever put anyone else's health at risk.[/i]
Arenamontanus wrote:
Back to the main topic: undead. I think turning a dead body into a temporary or permanent morph is wonderfully creepy. Suppose you infiltrate the tissue with nano-actuators, essentially adding a fullerene actuator mesh along muscle fibers and linking it to an artificial nervous system. Replace the brain with a cyberbrain, and the senses you want with cybernetics. Voila, your own zombie body!
I absolutely love this idea! Even cooler, what if we cut the cyberbrain out? Instead, the zombie nanites sever the brainstem and install a puppetsock connected directly to a fabricated computer, which runs a simple preinstalled combat AI. Senses like the eyes and ears are simulated through fabricated microcameras that form within the eyes and wire directly to the computer. Or perhaps the computer can be equipped with an echolocation system so that the need for eyes can be eliminated completely. Without biological processes, the zombie morph doesn't need any part of the brain to function anyways. Instant horror movie zombie. To up the ante, the AI computer can be installed in the neck rather than head, allowing the zombie morph to subvert the traditional "aim for the head" tactics that genre-savvy people will turn to. This will be especially effective if they do work off of echolocation, as the elimination of the eyes will not hinder the zombie in the least.
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
athanasius athanasius's picture
ZOMBI.... a killed brain is
ZOMBI.... a killed brain is not a killed corpse, if the body is fresh is possible to use nano to rewire the muse compuring core to the remaning nervous system! The brain is death but the corpse is a computer controlled pupett, offensively you can implant a simple battle AI and use the corpse of your enemy as drone, simple and elegant but not so effective. Another source of computing power is the CS, it have a lot of memory too, rewiring it and mesh using the muse as bonus you can create a crude cyberbrain and have a viable infiltrator, probably the limit of the joke is that you must use a beta for run it but can work. For obtain perfect body for this use i suggest poisons or nano, something that is selective in action on brain matter, one nasty approach is use nano that kill neurotrasmitters: you inject them and they kill the signals inside the brain, the ego is death but the body is perfect, then use the jokes above. For cold body the suggestion of Arenamontanusis almost too good, as before i suggest to use the remaning hardware in the brain for computing power and rewire the nervous system for power distribution and signal transmission, then use body fat for power generation! this approach have a pro, the brain itself is composed of a lot of fat and is dense, a lot of fuel direcly next to the new control centerand at the root of the power distribution system..... and don't forgot BRAIIIINNN: the mouth is just below, open a hole and carry new brain to the generator ;) Extra, the human body waste a lot of energy for life keeping functions, in a death body if you can keep muscle working all the internal volume is bonus, useful if you need to pose as living but a huge tank filled of energy rich molecule if you need only energy. Is not so difficult to simulate a living body from a nano souped cadaver: active muscolar function is the base, if you can do that you can have a breath ad a pulse, using waste heat jou have a body temp, blood can be made useful again for thermal distribution and oxygen carry. The nano for the base work seem simple within EP settings, can even be made viral for a zomby plague.. and a good enemy can control the zomby trought mesh for something more than a Romero film. So the corpse can be an useful asset for EP campaigns, i'll use this idea for a horror event at a station infested by zombizer nanoplague! Romero stage for my players.
Lorsa Lorsa's picture
Since it sort of came up here
Since it sort of came up here, can I hijack this thread and ask why a biomorph takes so long to grow? A healing vat can grow a body from a head in 2 weeks time, and I refuse to believe that a head is SO much more complex it would take one and a half year just for that. Not to mention it still implies that pods takes 2 weeks. So what do people usually go with? Is the healing vat's healing time wrong or is the stated morph growing time wrong? They really seem to be conflicting to me.
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Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
I did the calculations in an
I did the calculations in an old thread on the subject (the archives are a treasure-trove, but the search function is crap). The morph grow time is plausible given how fast cells can grow (even when boosted), and largely limited by how fast nerves can grow into the limbs. If you cheat and grow everything as small pieces it can be done much quicker, but now you will have to Frankenstein together the pieces and maybe replace the long nerves with artificial ones. Healing vats presumably work by using nanomachines to pick apart and reassemble the body, supplemented by maybe culturing reserve cells quickly. I assume they could be used to rebuild a body very fast, but it would essentially be a pod... however, for *cultural* reasons such a repaired person would not be regarded as a pod nor have the stigma.
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Lorsa Lorsa's picture
I still don't understand. If
I still don't understand. If a healing vat can build a full body in about 3 weeks (I'm adding in one week for the head) which according to the rules is no different from the original, then how would a new body built this way in any way be noticeable as anything but a normal biomorph? A friend of mine and I sort of came to the conclusion that it was probably best to follow the healing vat guidelines and scrap the stated "morph growth time". This was added by the fact that biomorphs are WAY WAY WAY too cheap if it takes that long to make them. I suppose we could be wrong and should revisit this discussion but it seemed to me the old slow morph growth was outdated technology and that healing vats were fairly new and haven't been completely introduced to the morph creation business yet.
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Decivre Decivre's picture
Lorsa wrote:I still don't
Lorsa wrote:
I still don't understand. If a healing vat can build a full body in about 3 weeks (I'm adding in one week for the head) which according to the rules is no different from the original, then how would a new body built this way in any way be noticeable as anything but a normal biomorph? A friend of mine and I sort of came to the conclusion that it was probably best to follow the healing vat guidelines and scrap the stated "morph growth time". This was added by the fact that biomorphs are WAY WAY WAY too cheap if it takes that long to make them. I suppose we could be wrong and should revisit this discussion but it seemed to me the old slow morph growth was outdated technology and that healing vats were fairly new and haven't been completely introduced to the morph creation business yet.
At our tables, we work under the assumption that there's something about brain development that takes a long period of time, and brains cannot yet be easily replicated with nanotech. This would explain why the rules stipulate that a whole body can be regrown from a severed-yet-intact still-living head, but not from... say, a finger. This 3-year period is the mandatory period in which the brain, in a nanotech-assisted growth vat along with the rest of the body, goes from a pile of immature neural cells all the way to a mature brain capable of housing an ego. This would also explain why cyberbrains can't house asyncs, or generate psi abilities. Our understanding of brain biology, while capable of recreating a digital backup and emulating it, has not yet reached complete biological understanding.
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]