What realistically would happen if someone came back to life from the dead ?
Clarification: I mean a person who has actually been dead for a while and suddenly they're alive again
We have examples of people being misidentified as dead, who rise either at the hospital, mortuary, or after.
It is speculated this is one of reasons 'wakes' were established, just to make sure the loved one was well and truly dead before committing them to earth.
Something that nobody seems to have touched upon is the fact that many dead people are embalmed.
If you suddenly came alive again after being embalmed, you'd suddenly become dead again.
Also, post-mortem examinations are not uncommon if the cause of death was not clear. Again this might lead to instant re-death.
Finally, if the cause of death /was/ clear (such as trauma), then again, that may likely result in instant re-death.
While technically true, this really doesn't change the question. Life is a complex series of chemical reactions; death is what happens when these reactions stop.
Let's say you die of heart failure. Your heart stops pumping blood. Then the brain stops getting oxygen, due to the lack of blood. Then rigor mortis, and so on. If these aren't all fixed, you would also re-die immediately (actually, without the brain function being fixed, you would never really be alive again).
The premise assumes that all of that has been addressed by them coming back to life. Adding a few external factors doesn't change that. If it did, the simple fact that most people are buried and would suffocate would render the point moot. Same for decomposition.
Although cremation would be awfully hard to tackle...
They would go "Who was elected?" and immediately return to their casket.
Life insurance companies would be changing their terms and conditions.
Years and years of fucking with legal system of your country.
Not really. My country's legal system, at least, foresees that someone may be mistakenly declared dead and so provides in the Todeserklärungsgesetz (§ 24):
(1)Wenn der für tot Erklärte persönlich vor Gericht erscheint und die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung verlangt, so hat das Gericht, falls die Identität des Antragstellers mit dem für tot Erklärten unzweifelhaft feststeht, ohne weiteres Verfahren die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung auszusprechen.
which translates to:
If the person who has been declared dead appears personally in front of a court and demands the cancellation of the declaration of death, then the court has to, if there is no doubt as to the identity of the applicant with the person who has been declared dead, without further procedure declare the annulment of the declaration of death.
True. I can imagine a kafkaic scene with the reborn person talking to some official, telling them that they're dead and they can't be of any help, despite them standing right in front of them.
I imagine it would be a total ballache for the person https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/03/they-said-i-dont-exist-but-i-am-here-one-womans-battle-to-prove-she-isnt-dead
I swear to God Dave if you found the necronomicon again
Realistically, Netflix documentary, lots of interviews, newspaper articles, sharing by facebook uncles. If that person is religious, either a following or a statement about seeing the light.
I imagine some religious folks would kill them as an affront to their religion or conversely imprisoned in secret government lab for testing.
If they've been dead for a while then the body is going to be quite decayed so that unfortunate person would end up dying again immediately.
Unless you're suggesting this thing that came to life is no longer human. So in that case decayed body/flesh, missing organs/bodyparts, etc. no longer prevent it from "life". But I'd argue that isn't a human coming back to life, more like a corpse transforming into something else.
A few months ago, we had a question about what would happen if necromancy was possible and an undead was called as a court witness. I gave a rather fun-to-write, tongue-in-cheek answer, which might be germane to your question too. Here's just a snippet:
So now we come back to zombies. Would a jury be able to set aside their shock, horror, and awe about a zombie in court that they could focus on being the finder of fact? If a zombie says they’re an eye-witness to a mugging, would their lack of actual eyeballs confuse the jury? Even more confusing would be a zombie that is testifying as an expert witness. Does their subject matter need to be recent? What if the case needs an expert on 17th Century Parisian fashion and the undead is from that era and worked in haute couture? Are there no fashion historians who could provide similar expert opinions?
Depends. Once you're dead and everything stops working, coming back means dealing with decomposition and a shitton of toxins. Can the system deal with it naturally? What's the first stuff to go during decay and can the body do without them?
This is what I was thinking. You’d be going around in a partially decayed body, smelling like hell till all your cells could refresh.
The definition of death is that it is not reversible, so it would mean that the person never was dead in the first place.
Thanks, I'll keep that take in my pocket for later. "Your honor, you can't possibly prove that in the future a superintelligence won't be able to reconstruct enough of the victim's brain to resurrect them, and hence they aren't dead and I can't have committed murder!".
Either nobody would believe it, or it would be on every screen and headline for a week, before the next news cycle Swiss the attention away.
Nobody would believe it, even if there was a live video feed of the death and the resurrection.
Depending on your definition people actually have come back from the dead. Friend of mine for one. I'm lucky to live in that timeline.
Death is rather difficult to define precisely. If you define it as "the cessation of consciousness," then you die every night. Every sleep cycle has some portions of minimal brain activity. There's nobody home for these periods.
They would need to have their brain destroyed or head severed to stop them from eating people and making more like themselves.
Get killed because that's a zombie
She simply goes on with her life.
Yes, I know her, she is well over 80 years old now.
It would no longer be the world-view destroying event that it would have have been 100 years ago. The moment someone came up with the idea of a matter-energy transporter, we had the idea of how someone could come back from the dead. Today we know exactly how it would be done - we just lack the technology.
Unless they are Uma Turman with her masochistic palm-fist strike training.
Or burned into ash.