I was reading the wiki page on amber and it got me thinking. Is it possible to an entire human in amber? What would the process be like? I assume the blood and other liquids would need to be pumped out and replaced with formaldehyde or some such. But what about the actual immersion process? If you heat up amber and put something in it, will it re-amberify once it cools down? For how long could a human be preserved with this method? Could the Russians use this as a cheaper alternative to keep Lenin looking fresh? Has a crazy artist or scientist ever tried this sort of thing?
Yes, but not using amber. http://www.gwern.net/plastination
Synthetic compounds could be injected into your body to preserve it. The critical thing is that if the right compounds are used on your brain, theoretically the synapses could be preserved.
If your whole body, or just your brain, were plastinated, it would be theoretically possible for people in the future to use the information to create a new version of yourself that would have all of your memories.
It’s an interesting philosophical question whether or not this would be the same as “you” surviving" or not.
I’m not sure natural amber would melt to liquid if heated - it was originally liquid resin, but during fossilisation, all the lighter volatiles dissipate, leaving behind something that’s essentially a block of natural plastic (not all plastics are meltable).
But a dessicated or otherwise preserved human body could be encased in a block of clear polyester resin or some other polymer. Don’t try it with a fresh corpse though - as it would eventually become a plastic block with a corpse-shaped cavity inside, filled with disgusting soup - or the gases from decomposition might actually burst the block.
How about honey instead of amber!?
So I guess the viscera and various liquids will need to be removed beforehand? This sounds like too much work, I was kind of hoping this could be a simpler and less time consuming alternative to taxidermy.
Yes, but only after dessication/mummification. If you encase in amber a water-fat corpse, the gases and liquid will burst through the amber.
The whole Egyptian mummification process evolved from desiccation. Corpses buried in the desert, away from the flood plain, it was noticed, dried out and preserved like jerky - except maybe the very wet torso and braincase. Mummification involved removing the wet bits to insert in jars, and treating the rest of the corpse with salts and oils to create a form of Pharoah jerky.
(A memorable exhibit in the Cairo Museum was the mummified crocodile “carefully preserved with a turpentine enema”.)
Just immersing a corpse (or a not-corpse, if that’s your inclination) into a vat of amber would not guarantee that the preservative (bacteria-killing) compounds would penetrate the body before rot set in. For modern embalming, they use formaldehyde a much more fluid and anti-bacterial chemical; and it’s actively pumped deep throughout the body.
Insects look pretty preserved in amber because they have an exoskeleton of chitin, so even if their juicy bits (i.e. inside the abdomen, etc.) have rotted away, the drier, not-rotting exterior is still solid. Plus, being much smaller, likely a lot of the fluids would have evaporated between death and complete encasement - the volume to surface area ratio being much much greater.
Plastination, then encasement in a block of resin should do it. Plastination is just like freeze-drying, except that it employs solvents to remove fats as well as water - both of which are then replaced by something else such as polyethylene glycol.
Or Sokushinbutsu - ritual self-mummification. Takes a lot of prep time, though.