Practical Applications of Petrification (RAR!)

[amigocabal]

The concept of petrification of living things has been around for thousands of years, from ancient mythology to modern role-playing games on video game systems.

If a method existing to petrify, and safely depetrify, living things at low cost, what would be the practical application in modern societies around the world? Would any industries be revolutionized by cheap, easily available petrification and depetrification?

[Formless]

Concrete.

Oops. I just made petrification moot.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Space travel: You've just invented a really, really good method of preserving people in stasis for space flight. The flight can take decades...centuries...millennia...doesn't matter to the crew.

Food preservation: It should work since we eat organic matter, and it would be much better than freezing.

Medicine: You can petrify the injured to stabilize them until they get to the hospital. Also some otherwise impossible surgeries might become possible; petrify the person at the dangerous point so their life processes stop, then use stonecutting tools to finish the operation before unpetrifying them and closing them up. Long term storage of organs and blood would be another possibility.

[Spoonist]

Longevity: you can easily increase your lifetime by petrifying on/off, as LofA pointed out - for instance during travel. If you are a high executive you could petrify for the flight. But also if you petrify for one day a week, or whenever there is nothing important going on.

Science: think of a natural history museum where you could have a couple of each species which could be revived centuries later if necessary

Torture: obvious

Military/police: can the method be made into a weapon? if so it will.

crime: lots and lots of potential, need to ditch a body? why not literally ditch it?

Justice/Legal: sounds like a very humane way to kill someone - petrify them, chop them into pieces - no pain, no trauma
Which could also work like a punishment instead of Death penalty - I condemn you to eternal petrification

[Terralthra]

What happens to metal or precious minerals in rock that is depetrified? If they remain intact, it could lead to interesting mining techniques.

[amigocabal]

Longevity: you can easily increase your lifetime by petrifying on/off, as LofA pointed out - for instance during travel. If you are a high executive you could petrify for the flight. But also if you petrify for one day a week, or whenever there is nothing important going on.

Science: think of a natural history museum where you could have a couple of each species which could be revived centuries later if necessary

Torture: obvious

Military/police: can the method be made into a weapon? if so it will.

crime: lots and lots of potential, need to ditch a body? why not literally ditch it?

Justice/Legal: sounds like a very humane way to kill someone - petrify them, chop them into pieces - no pain, no trauma
Which could also work like a punishment instead of Death penalty - I condemn you to eternal petrification

Prisons would also be much safer.

[Zwinmar]

And if the being remains conscious for the duration? At the end of the trip/prison time/ et. al. you would have a population of people out of their minds.

[Lord of the Abyss]

And if the being remains conscious for the duration? At the end of the trip/prison time/ et. al. you would have a population of people out of their minds.

Presumably that wouldn't happen since a petrified brain has no metabolism and no chemical exchange; it should just sit there inert. And even if it could think it would have no way to form new memories or otherwise change, it'd be stuck in a loop essentially; I don't think it could go insane.

[Zwinmar]

But there is some precedence for a being to remain conscious in fantasy stories, specifically the one I can think of off the top of my head is Dragon Age: Origins, the one you find in the Mage's Tower. After all if this is a 'magical' process biology really might not fully apply.

[Ahriman238]

A terror weapon of course. Depending on the fine details, it might make a good nonlethal or crowd control weapon. Turn a person or a crowd to stone and revive them at your convenience.

A practical stasis has already been mentioned, and most of the implications of that.

As for the prison thing, I see two options. Either the person is concious while stone, or they aren't. If they are, that's a problem, "cruel and unusual punishment" in the US legal scene. If they aren't, then you've given up on prisons for anything beyond incapactitation. While a prisoner is a bit of statuary, he isn't out committing crimes, but he's also not reflecting on his deeds and their consequences. There is no room for rehabilitation, nor any actual punishment going on except the sense of displacement when they reenter the world after 5, 10, 20, maybe 30 years in which they haven't aged and haven't kept abrest of politics, pop culture, or any other changes. Guess what freezing people in time to throw them into a completely alien world is going to do for the recidivism rate?

[Ralin]

If they aren't, then you've given up on prisons for anything beyond incapactitation. While a prisoner is a bit of statuary, he isn't out committing crimes, but he's also not reflecting on his deeds and their consequences. There is no room for rehabilitation, nor any actual punishment going on except the sense of displacement when they reenter the world after 5, 10, 20, maybe 30 years in which they haven't aged and haven't kept abrest of politics, pop culture, or any other changes.

Depends on how quickly and cheaply the petrification process can be done and undone. Being able to keep prisoners in cold storage when they're not in class, studying, doing job training or being fed and showered once a month would work wonders for reducing violence and simplifying management of the general population.

Guess what freezing people in time to throw them into a completely alien world is going to do for the recidivism rate?

I think you're seriously underestimating what taking away five, ten, twenty or thirty years of someone's life, and having them spend it in a violent prison environment, does to people anyway.

[Formless]

You forgot to allocate time for sleep. That tends to be lethal. No really. Lethal. After just one week without sleep, you die.

You can't simply petrify people and expect it to obsolete conventional prisons. Not as long as humans are still human, and still have a 24 hour sleep/wake cycle, plus a need to eat and digest their food. About all it would do for the prison system is give you a way to properly transfer prisoners who are particularly dangerous or prone to escape during transport.




Oh, here's something, though its not grandiose or anything: solving jet lag. Record the time when your flight leaves, petrify yourself, and leave instructions not to transform you back until your internal clock is synchronized with the local timezone.

[Darmalus]

Petrification works as an alternative to the death penalty. Just petrify them and put them in indefinite storage. Completely reversible if the sentence is overturned for whatever reason.

Also works as a better version of cryogenics. Patient on the verge of death with no way to save them? Petrify them until they can be some time in the future.

Militarily, I can think of several long, boring deployments where I wouldn't have minded being petrified when I wasn't on watch.

Edit: I am assuming you are unconscious while petrified.

[Simon_Jester]

You forgot to allocate time for sleep. That tends to be lethal. No really. Lethal. After just one week without sleep, you die.

You can't simply petrify people and expect it to obsolete conventional prisons. Not as long as humans are still human, and still have a 24 hour sleep/wake cycle, plus a need to eat and digest their food. About all it would do for the prison system is give you a way to properly transfer prisoners who are particularly dangerous or prone to escape during transport.

Correct me if I am mistaken, but do marble statues have a 24 hour sleep/wake cycle, plus a need to eat and digest their food? If not, why would petrified statue-people have those things? Isn't that sort of the point of petrifying them?

[Formless]

Let me refer you back to Ahriman's original post. Go ahead, its just a few posts up. You either didn't read that, or you horribly misread me. I was responding to Ralin.

[Lord Relvenous]

You forgot to allocate time for sleep. That tends to be lethal. No really. Lethal. After just one week without sleep, you die.

You can't simply petrify people and expect it to obsolete conventional prisons. Not as long as humans are still human, and still have a 24 hour sleep/wake cycle, plus a need to eat and digest their food. About all it would do for the prison system is give you a way to properly transfer prisoners who are particularly dangerous or prone to escape during transport.

Correct me if I am mistaken, but do marble statues have a 24 hour sleep/wake cycle, plus a need to eat and digest their food? If not, why would petrified statue-people have those things? Isn't that sort of the point of petrifying them?

Such a prison would be for punishment, only, with absolutely no chance of rehabilitation. You might as well just institute an automatic death-penalty for the good that it would do for society. There are attempts at rehabilitation in US prisons, and even with that the recidivism rate is still horrendously high. If you turn your prison system into a freezer where criminals lose nearly consequence-free years (they don't age, and they're not aware of the time span of punishment) and then are released, that prisoner has no chance whatsoever of changing.

[Ralin]

Hmm, well let's try this again. Even if all you do is keep some or most of the prison population stoned, that does free up a lot of resources to focus on containing and rehabilitating the rest. You could probably even alter sentencing laws so that only time spent unpetrified counts towards time served, thus giving more incentive to cooperate with treatment.

[Rossum]

Invest your money, have yourself petrified while the money is collecting interest, get de-petrified and hopefully be able to use your newfound wealth to enjoy the future.

Invest in space travel, get petrified until space travel is cheap and commonplace, hopefully at that point your initial investment would be worth enough to get you a decent life in a future where humans can colonize the stars.


If you can somehow turn rock, slag, or sand into organic material then it could revolutionize industries and provide a new fuel source. Or the organic material could be used as animal feed.

Could become a socially accepted replacement for assisted suicide, people wanting to kill themselves could instead be petrified. Assuming they are de-petrified later on, doctors and professionals would then be able to work with them to solve whatever problem drove them to that point.

Some sort of organ harvesting program. People are petrified, then their heads are removed, then the body is de-petrified and the organs and tissue harvested for use. The heads could then be stored until some hypothetical point where they can be given new bodies. This could happen to volunteers, criminals, or people who were petrified for some other reason and their statues weren't kept safe from organ thieves.

Religious cults or investment scams. New members are convinced that they can be saved from gods wrath or get rich by being petrified and giving all of their worldly possessions to the guy running the scam.

Morally ambiguous artwork.

Corpse disposal.

Getting rid of people you don't like while not technically killing them. This way, if you are ever caught then you can just show the police where you kept the statue and hopefully get a lighter sentence. Useful for serial killers as well as criminal organizations or governments.

Population control without engaging in mass murder.

Petrifying samples of modern flora and fauna in order to preserve the species for later generations.

An alternative to putting animals to sleep (just petrify the animal until you find an owner for them). Or sell the petrified animal as a piece of art when the number of petrified pets inevitably starts growing faster than the number of people adopting/buying them.

Farmers could petrify lifestock to keep them in stasis to be revived at some later point. In the event that civilization collapses due to a zombie apocalypse or nuclear holocaust, the petrified livestock can be revived at a later date in order to restore the species or eat them for food.