Snap Freezing or Putting Your Entrails in Jars, It's A Tough Choice

Apparently we have just had a Tutankhamen exhibition in Australia. I know this because I saw a small newspaper article indicating that it had finished and had been very successful. It might have been even more successful if they had told anybody it was happening. I guess it was the usual collection of trinkets half inched from the tombs of the long dead plus, perhaps, a mock up of the mummy and its case. I doubt if Tutankhamen himself made the trip. At his age his doctors have probably advised him to lay off long distance air travel.

Tutankhamen has had a pretty rough existence really. Firstly he died (and isn't that a great thing to have at the beginning of your biography?) then all his soft bits got taken out and stored in jars. As a preservation technique this worked about as well as storing any organic material in a jar without a vacuum seal is likely to do. Finally the hamfisted clowns who found him hacked his body into about a dozen pieces getting it out the mummy case. No wonder he needs bandages, we can consider ourselves lucky the body isn't encased in plaster of paris. Judging by what has happened to him over the years Tutankhamen probably considers himself lucky that he was dead for most of it. Still, wacking him on a plane and flying him to Australia was probably considered just a step too far.

Nowadays, of course, everything would be much easier. The moment Tutankhamen dropped (or was possibly pushed) off the twig he could have been snap frozen and carted off to a cryogenic storage facility. These facilities work by, well ok we don't actually know that they work at all. Essentially they're nothing more than a sophisticated deep freeze for storing the corpses of people who can't take a hint. What happens is when the subject dies the body is snap frozen as quickly as possible (to prevent that awkward rotting that rapidly sets in) and then; nothing actually. There isn't anything more we can do with them at present. The fond hope of the subject is that at some unspecified time in the future somebody will have nothing better to do than attempt to reanimate the bodies of the dead. Hopefully by this stage a cure will have been found for whatever killed them. In the meantime there is nothing much we can do with these bodies except put them somewhere the children won't trip over them.

For the rest the staff at a cryogenics facility are about as much use as a bunch of Egyptian priests who, after taking out and jarring the entrails, stuffing the resultant hole with grass, anointing with perfumes and preservatives and finally wrapping what's left in bandages, are accosted by an anxious family member saying something like "Do you think he'll get better?" To which the honest answer is "Probably not but just on the offchance you might want to leave a meal or two lying around in case he wakes up and feels peckish". At which point they're going to feel like total dicks for removing his entire digestive system.

With cryogenics of course after the corpse has been defrosted what you're left with is a defrosted corpse. It doesn't even have bandages on it. Of course the subject hopes that one day a cure will be discovered or a means of rolling back the aging process will have been developed. This is quite likely. Over the centuries we have actually come up with cures for most of the things that have killed humans throughout history. We could probably cure Tutankhamen if it came to that. The real problem that cryogenics staff are going to face is not curing the disease its raising the dead. I can't help thinking that posting your body to Haiti might be a better option.

If the cryogenics people do try to raise the dead we can only hope that they'll fail. Think of all the problems. For starters imagine the paperwork. It takes long enough to apply for unemployment benefits now. Then there are overcrowding issues, food supply of course and the reappearance at family gatherings of that tedious uncle everybody thought was safe in the grave. Naturally some people will benefit; probate lawyers probably have wet (or frozen) dreams about situations like this. Historians, too, will have a field day as they clamour to interview people dragged back from the afterlife so that they can discover what happened in the barbarous and semi mythical twenty first century. Probably the first question they will ask is, "Why the fuck did you freeze your dead?"