Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

It’s one of the most famous lines from the famous TV series. He’s dead Jim. Always said by Bones McCoy, usually standing over or kneeling next to the body of a red shirted crewman (the spear carrier extras of Trek). The crewman (and it’s almost always a male) is marked by suckers, or has something sticking in them, or has nothing obviously wrong at all. Now this is never pronounced over someone who has been disintegrated. I guess it’s obvious to even the most dull of the crew that that person is gone forever. But what about the crewman who is more or less intact, with the exception of the ceasing of biologic functions that constitute life? Why are they dead? It would seem to me that if you had the technology to fly between the stars at hundreds of times the speed of light, and disassemble and reassemble people through a teleportation system, a small thing like the cessation of biological function should be a small speed bump. You should be able to bring them back to life without much hassle. If nothing else, you should be able to put them in the teleporter and set it to bring them back as they were when last stored in the memory system, as a living organism.
What about if you don’t have a magical teleportation device hanging around to reconstruct the corpse back into a living person? It would seem with the medical advances that are just around the corner, and then around the corner from them, we may not need any magical devices. Soon we will be able to regenerate just about any tissues. Cloning will allow us to grow replacements organs, including limbs, if not whole bodies. Nanotech will give us the ability to repair internal systems without cutting open the body. Nerve regeneration is also clearly obtainable in the near future. Remember Christopher Pike in his chair, unable to talk other than by a blinking light. A few days in a regeneration tank and he would be running around the star base, ogling the miniskirted women. Spock’s brain? A cloud of nanites and the damned thing would be rewired and reattached. With possible mind uploads and newly grown bodies even disintegration might not be the end. Ensign MacCarty may not have to end his promising career due to a small thing like getting caught in a Klingon disrupter beam. So what about getting to the body before too much decay? How much is too much, and can we possibly reconstruct cells to a level where they will function again? We don’t know enough about the brain to actually say when the point of no return will be for future medicine. And if there is a point of no return, what about quick freezing before they reach that point, and then the nanotech can rebuild the cells, just like would have to be done if they were in some kind of cryo preservation for long voyages.
I truly believe that when we get to the twenty-third century we will have conquered most medical problems, and even most forms of death. I am sure we will gain that ability well before we are flying along at faster than light or teleporting people from one place to another. And physicians or medics won’t say, “he’s dead Jim.” They’ll pull out their containers, scoop what’s left of the patient into them, and head for med bay, where they can start the process of saving their patient.