Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackbravo | Hacker News Reader

What if the tombs and mummification's where ancient attempts at doing something like current cryonics. And we are just going there, unearthing them, and not fulfilling our future part of the deal? :-p

View on HN

Well mummification involves removing the brain and major internal organs so at least physically it probably won't work.

I think the goal was to have a good time in the afterlife. And I guess by disturbing their graves we've prevented that from happening :-) Or, they had already enjoyed a few millennia there and don't mind the change...

On a serious note it is surprising to see them just let large groups of people in to touch and snap pictures

They didn't believe in "life after death" like Christians do. After death, your soul got rigorously tested. And if it passed the tests, you got to the afterlife. It was actually a lot more complicated, in that they thought that there seven souls, but whatever.

Bottom line, though, was that survival in the afterlife depended on the integrity of your mummy. They removed the brain and internal organs because mummification didn't work, otherwise.

Then they should have left instructions we could read! But in all seriousness, this brings up a pretty good point if you plan to freeze yourself. You better make sure that your wishes are recorded in a way that could be understood by future people (or aliens?) who may find you and no longer know how to read any current modern language.

If that's the way you are thinking, probably spend most of that effort evaluating the entity that says it's gonna keep you frozen.

In a way they are, the Egyptian's had the Book of the Dead, there idea to optimise for the afterlife, I think this is what gave rise to magic spells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Dead

The British Museum had an amazing exhibition about this several years ago.

A question that needs no answer

I think it's a perfectly valid question and one suited for hacker news. I understand that the cost of freezing isn't much off from the price of a funeral. But we don't have the cultural rituals to support it as a common option at the moment -- or laws that would let a person get frozen before medically dying.

It is impossible[0] to fulfill the deal since those mummies are information-theoretically dead[1].

[0] assuming the arrow of time is irreversible [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death

Reply on news.ycombinator.com