Years ago, I read of serious proposals to irradiate foods with cobalt 60 gamma radiation. The idea was that irradiation would keep the food from spoiling, for long periods without refridgeration. I remember reading that after irradiation, and apple was put on a shelf and stayed free from deacy, for months.
So, could you preserve a dead body by doing this?
Well, with sufficient irradiation you could certainly prevent microbial decomposition of a corpse, but you would still be dealing with a myriad of chemical reactions which take place without the intervention of a microbe. Some of them might include coagulation, oxidative rancidification, dessication, and eventual recolonization by new microorganisms. I’ve done some human dissections before and once you remove the skin they desiccate VERY quickly which completely destroys the fragile structures that you are trying to identify. It might slow down the decay of the corpse, but it won’t preserve it ad infinitum.
I think recolonization would be the biggest problems, unless you did something like encasing the corpse in plexiglass (I think this is what they did with Lenin’s corpse). An uncut apple is pretty well sealed against its environment, but a human is leaky.
I came in to say this. If you sealed up the corpse in an airtight container and then irradiated it, you’d certainly stop bacterial decay. But, as as heavyarms notes, that won’t stop chemical reactions.
On the other hand, Spam and canned creamed corn will last for years in the can. So you’ll probably be good for a while.
I suspect that Lenin has been subjected to pretty extensive and bizarre treatment, and isn’t sealed away from the air. In fact, I suspect a lot of what’s in there ain’t the original Comrade Ulyanov. My fantasy is that someday Prince Charming will come along, open the coffin, kiss him, and return him to life, and they’ll rule from the Kremlin in the Clouds.
One more reason you don’t nuke the zombies.
I dunno, if you can’t destroy their brains with a nuke, what’s the point of shooting them?
Ha!
I have nothing further to add.
A body sterilized by radiation might or might not decay. The sterilization would put a temporary hold on most decay processes, but once the body was recolonized, decay would probably go on pretty normally. If the conditions were right, the body would dry out and mummify before decay organisms could get a foothold. If it’s in a warm, damp environment, you couldn’t get a mummy, just a temporary halt in the decay process.
On the other hand, if you had a body that was actually highly radioactive for one reason or another, you’re almost guaranteed to get a mummy, unless there are chemical things going on like an irradiated fat person in an alkaline environment, but putrefaction, etc are pretty unlikely.
Irradiated food, btw, is just sterilized food. It’s not radioactive, but it takes a lot longer to decay because invading organisms take a while to get a foothold.
And that means happy shoppers at Sam’s Club.
If this doesn’t become a zombie thread, nothing will.
Of course it would decay … with a half-life dependent on what the irradiation had produced.
I know that’s a joke, but just because something is irradiated, doesn’t make that thing radioactive itself. In practice, that usually only happens with neutron radiation, and certainly not with gamma radiation.
Supposedly, the corpses of the three victims of the SL1 reactor accident , showed no signs of decay (even though there was a several-days delay in recovering the last body) due to exactly this situation - they’d been exposed to an extreme dose of radiation and were very heavily contaminated. The book ‘Idaho Falls’ by William McKeown, discusses this in some detail.
Sure you’d get some of them, but outside the blast area, where you would typically see radiation exposure killing normal people…zombies would be more fortified against decomposition.
Cite? 