Jon Snow Is Back And Here’s How It Might Be Scientifically Possible In Real Life Too

Without giving you much time to complain, here, let me tell you – SPOILERS. MAJOR SPOILERS. Jon Snow is alive in the new season of Game of Thrones. Although to what extent is he back to normal is yet to be seen. But the fact is, he’s alive.

And if you still haven’t seen the new episode then:

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But all that aside, we saw how Jon Snow was stabbed multiple times, then magically reanimated by Lady Melisandre. And although it took a lot of High Valyrian and a “please” for her to bring him back to life, there’s a possibility that it might be scientifically possible in real life. How? Let’s explore.

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The cool folks at Science.Mic came up with a plausible explanation.First of all, Jon was stabbed and his body was left outside at sub-zero temperature. His body barely showed any signs of decay, which means he was either killed not a long time back, or the extreme cold did not allow the body to decompose.

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Sam Parnia, an assistant professor of critical care medicine at Stony Brook Medicine says, “We’ve all been brought up to think death is an absolute moment — when you die, you can’t come back. It used to be correct, but now with the basic discovery of CPR, we’ve come to understand that the cells inside your body don’t become irreversibly ‘dead’ for hours after you’ve ‘died’ … Even after you’ve become a cadaver, you’re still retrievable.”

Meaning, if your cells don’t die – which they don’t for quite a bit after your death – you can still be revived. The extreme cold – that is able to keep an entire wall made out of ice intact – would surely have helped in preserving his body and cells. And technically, cryopreservation is not a new concept to us.

 

Now if you’re worrying about the amount of blood he lost which led to the formation of almost a pool, let’s talk about that.

Dr. Samuel Tisherman, with a team at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pennsylvania, had started trials to try and keep gunshot and knife wound victims alive, by chilling them and keeping their blood intact with a chemical coolant – or scientifically better known as EPR (Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation). Some even call it suspended animation, which is basically just buying time for the doctors to fix the patients.

 

Obviously, the trials weren’t performed on humans and the experiments were done on pigs. The pigs were sedated and given injuries similar to gunshots and stabbing leading them to lose their pulse and lose half of their blood

A tube was inserted into the pigs’ aorta, which was used to pump coolant in and blood out until the body temperatures reached 10 degree Celsius – half of normal body temperatures for pigs. After surgery, the coolant + blood solution was replaced with the old blood in the pigs’ bodies and eureka! 90% of the pigs recovered once they got the blood back.

 

But how does that stop the brain from going dead, especially with no blood to carry oxygen supply to it? Good question. Let’s figure that out.

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In extremely cold conditions, the metabolism rate of your body drops drastically to prevent the brain from getting damaged due to oxygen starvation. But then what if Jon Snow was brain-dead?

 

A life sciences company called Bioquark thinks it has the answer with its Reanima Project. It claims that it can reverse the process of brain-death using neural regeneration and reanimation, similar to reptiles and amphibians.

Bioquark CEO, Ira Pastor said in an interview, “With amphibians, you can blow their brains apart, in some case remove them entirely, and the brain grows back. We’re focusing on developing proteins and other biomolecules to recapitulate these dynamics in humans.”

He also adds, “If you lowered the body temperature to prevent brain death events, and were able to reinfuse blood to stop the major cascade of inflammation, we would not say that’s far-fetched. We’re starting with the brain stem, looking at independent breathing and heartbeat. But the goal at the end of the day would be to reintegrate the entire central nervous system.”

 

And besides, there have been various incidences of people waking up from the dead and even being resuscitated after being dead for hours. So maybe, maybe there’s a slight possibility that pulling a Jon Snow might be possible in real life too. It’s time to awaken to a new scientific possibility.

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And if not, then I’m sure there is a Melisandre in some parallel universe waking one Jon Snow at a time.

H/T: Science.Mic
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