Inspired by this thread.
Let’s say you took an average human being and removed their entire skeleton. I don’t know if you could do this surgically so just assume we did it by magic or teleportation or something.
Assuming this person had immediate medical care available, would not having a skeleton still cause immediate death? If not, how long could they live? And what would be the specific cause of their death?
Everything would collapse on itself. Heart couldn’t pump well, blood couldn’t flow well, brain would get deformed by gravity, lungs couldn’t inflate either. Ugly quick death.
Even if that was avoided, the bone marrow makes the blood, so death would arrive eventually.
The bone marrow is essential, as new blood cells (red cells? Certain white cells?) are generated there.
A boneless fillet of live human would tend to be very floppy. I picture this as being something like a giant amoeba. You could simply ooze your way around. Or pour your body into an artificial exoskeleton, and stay very very still until your new bones grow back.
ETA: Partially ninjad by the good doctor. If death came quickly enough, perhaps it would be merciful. It would be ugly for the folks who have to mop you up afterward.
Could this be partially alleviated by having the person floating in a tank of water so his body was supported by the water?
I figured the skin would keep you from oozing too much. And even without bones, a body would have some consistency - a boneless raw steak doesn’t spread out all over the plate. So you’d be sort of like a sack full of meat.
I did consider the bone marrow issue. How long would that take to become fatal and is there anyway to treat it?
This is what I thought of. Can your diaphragm even inflate your lungs without the resistance of your rib cage? I don’t think the hydraulics/pneumatics/whateverics of it works any more. Suffocation.
No, for two reasons.
The simplest is that the diaphragm anchors to the ribs. Without the ribs, the diaphragm has nothing to pull against as it contracts, so it would simply get shorter without changing position.
The second is that the inflation of the lungs relies on an increase in volume within the chest cavity. Without any ribs you don’t have any cavity to speak of. Even if the diaphragm could move downwards as it contracted, all it would do is pull the lungs and heart down with it, there couldn’t be any increase in volume.
But that may not to be the first thing that kills you. Without any skull, there is nothing against which to maintain fluid pressure.. The whole brain cavity is going to start swelling uncontrollably. Even if you were suspended in fluid to prevent the brain being crushed by the weight of the scalp, just the internal pressure will keep building until something bursts.
Nope, won’t help at all. There is still nothing for the muscles to contract against, and still nothing preventing the organs within the body from rushing each other. Any gravitational pull at all will see the lungs crushed by the shoulder muscles because there is nothing to hold the lungs in shape aside from their own rigidity.
I agree with everything else, but I’m not convinced on this point (though I am not an anatomist).
I mean, there are plenty of (normal) holes in my skull, and cerebrospinal fluid isn’t jetting out of any of them, so clearly something (the meninges I suppose?) is already containing the pressure. And plenty of people survive with even larger holes in their skulls – trepanning isn’t fatal by itself, nor is removing sections of the skull for other surgeries, nor is being a baby without a fully closed skull.
It’s quite possible that without lower sections of the skull, parts of the brain and spinal cord might collapse onto each other enough to cause damage (then again, it’s possible that there wouldn’t be damage), but it seems to me that a human could lose nearly all of the top, sides, and back of the skull without any necessary damage to the brain (not saying it would be easy to remove it all without killling the person, just that it’s theoretically possible).
Ray Bradbury’s short story “Skeleton” considered this matter.
Sentient meat.
Family Guy did an episode of this once, and Peter Griffin survived fine (sort of like a blob with a mouth). Can’t get more scientific than that.
Roddy
Wouldn’t the disappearance of the vertebrae protecting the spinal cord cause agonizing and searing pain throughout the blobby body?
So we need to do this in orbit, on the ISS.
And install a ventilator hose.
Maybe some kind of pressurized suit. We could use it to provide some support for the body in general and we could vary the chest pressure to inflate and deflate the lungs. If we attached it to a hinged backboard, we could also have our subject “sit up” and “stand”.
Anyone have details on the bone marrow issue?
You could cheat and say the marrow isn’t “bone” per se. Or if we’ve already specified a floatation tank and a respirator, we might as well add in blood transfusions.
I’m allowing any existing means of life support other than the use of artificial bones to replace the ones that were removed.
Well, yeah, if you’re going to be that way about it. But then your brain would be smashed up too, so it wouldn’t matter.
Actually, if no bones are allowed, all those nerve pathways are empty, both sympathetic and autonomous. So that brain will be feeling pretty weird about it. The motor control portion physically occupies a good part of it. Now what?
Without our skeleton, we would not be able to maintain our blood calcium levels during times of dietary fluctuation of calcium intake (maybe even through the night when we’re sleeping). Low calcium (hypocalcemia) very quickly leads to nasty things like muscle spasms, delirium, seizures (convulsions) and death.
ETA: Sharks don’t have bony skeletons and I have wondered how they maintain calcium homeostasis.
A movie was just released which may have the answer. SD is aware of it.
Kind of a spineless act isn’t it?