suddenly obsessed with the idea of Eridian "death" and potential resurrection.
If the body is mostly inorganic structure, and the "colonies" of cells are there to maintain various other inorganic structures (including the brain), it could be potentially possible for a donor to revive a dead Eridian.
This would likely be "fatal" to the "donor" (you definitely can't revive an Eridian with fewer than 50% of the colony cells any more than you could remove 50% of a human's blood and other fluids; and you can't have multiple donors because at those scales they would "compete" against each-other as they do during reproduction)
The body would need to be almost *completely* dead. Very few original colony cells remaining, at least. Which is probably not great for the structures, even inorganic ones. You'd probably want to flush out a lot of the dead colony cells, if possible.
It would probably be extremely difficult (needing to keep the donor cells alive as effectively an entire ecology is relocated. You'd probably need to separate them out, transport them separately, and inject them into specific sites. All quickly enough that they don't all die)
And of course that difficulty implies an extreme amount of danger
Philosophically, it might not be "the same person" - philosophical debate regarding if it's the brain, if it's the colony, or if it's the combination of the two, that make up the "person"
And even given that, I can imagine situations where it might be considered vital to try. eg, imagine the crew of the Blip-A: Their science specialists are dead. They had the knowledge required to study Astrophage. It might be possible to revive the body, and regain the knowledge from their crystaline brains. Unfortunately, the science specialist would be the one in the best position to know how to try such a dangerous procedure.
And then, once it's done, the revived Eridian might choose the same procedure to revive the donor.
Especially alongside human technology, future Eridian technology might be able to maintain their colonies outside of an Eridian carapace. If you can grow the colonies externally, you might be able to implant those into dead Eridians more easily. With the help of human science, they worked out how to make Me-Burgers pretty quickly, so effective immortality might be just around the corner for them.
Of course, there are probably "structural" issues that build up over time as well, limiting lifespans in other ways, continuing irrecoverable death. And the whole philosophical debate.
I read through that whole document about Eridian biology and there's nothing about death, other than a note about death through overheating (which only talks about the death of the colony / seems to equate death with death of the colony). Is there more about this elsewhere?
