I’m imagining being frozen and defrosted five hundred years from now.
Future historian: “You were alive during the beginning of what we now call the Great Mideast Shift, yes?”
Me: “Uh, apparently.”
Future historian: “Can you give us any insights into the geopolitical context of the movement? We’re particularly interested in the pressures put on cultures by the need for natural resources and the shifting alliances of various political bodies depending on which felt the other was trustworthy in the short term, based on how the increasingly complex web of trade put above-ground information management in competition with merchant interaction.”
Me: “Uh, I watched some of it on TV. It kinda sucked.” …pause…
</tongue in cheek>
I know what you mean. I just thought it was kinda funny.
Well, of course, it won’t really go like that. It’ll be more like,
FH: Our history books tell us that Americans of that time lived the life of excess, driving giant SUVs and throwing away a ton of garbage each year. Will you miss that kind of life of luxury?
Me: Well, it wasn’t all wine and roses, you know. Most people had to work in minimum wage jobs at fast-food joints and bookstores. We had traffic jams and paid 30% taxes.
FH: Yes, we’ve seen old episodes of “Roseanne”. Was that closer to reality than, say, the episodes of “I Love Lucy”? Why don’t you describe a typical day in your life.
I’m new to SDMB and I thought this thread looked interesting. Forgive my somewhat opinionated take on the issue of reanimation.
I see from previous posts that the first issue is whether it would be possible to reanimate. I look past this and ask, is it possible to reanimate both flesh and spirit? Some of you may say flesh is all there is to a person, but I would disagree. I think of the human being as a glass of water. The glass is our physical bodies; our muscles, our organs, our cells etc… The water represents the spiritual side to us all. Not in any religious sense, but in a sense of something beyond the physical realm. I think that just as a glass is useless without liquid and liquid cannot be drunk without a glass, so we are with our physical and spiritual selves. If you were able to reanimate Ben Franklin you would only have Ben in the flesh but not the spirit; what truly makes a person ‘alive’, IMHO. Death, to me, represents the glass being broken and the water/spirit being poured out, never to exist in that particular glass again. Again, religious beliefs aside, I believe that our spirit selves leave Earth when we die and so to reanimate a body means all you get is an empty shell, a ‘zombie’ if you will and not the true essence of that person.
