13997


I was wondering, suppose that I wrote in a Death Note,

> Person A in day x, month y, year z, hour h, minute i, second j, eaten by a
> gigantic sea-snake.
>
> A goes to the middle of the sea for diving. There, when he dives, a gigantic
> sea monster swallows him whole.

Is this kind of death possible? If so, wouldn't that make the Death Note the
greatest scientific tool ever? I mean, it could be used to verify the
existence of aliens too.


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2014-09-15T09:37:47.273
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question
death-note
What if you wrote "eaten by a gigantic sea-snake" in the Death Note?


I'll attempt an answer.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with this per se, given the Death Note
rules as I remember them. If sea monsters (or aliens) existed, this would be
hypothetically fine as long as the conditions for such scenarios coming into
play (e.g. A's journey to the sea doesn't take 24 days, or A doesn't have to
fly from Urumqi to the Atlantic Ocean in an hour) are appropriate and
possible. However, we run into some problems.

Obviously if sea monsters exist where A goes diving and the biology of sea
monsters allows them to swallow A, we're fine. But how about aliens? What if,
as I mentioned, it takes more than 23 days for them to arrive on earth?

If the aliens show up and kill A, or if the sea monster swallows him, we have
proof of those things existing. But if A just dies of a heart attack, we don't
know what we've "proved" or disproved. For example:

  * Maybe aliens (or whatever) don't exist.

  * Maybe it's impossible, _at least at the moment_ , for aliens to show up and kill A within 23 days, because they don't have the appropriate technology.

  * With kaine's comment - maybe the mathematician simply isn't capable of solving the Riemann hypothesis that quickly for whatever reason.

So if we get a "positive" result, we're good. But if we get a negative one, we
probably won't know why exactly such a result occurred, and in that sense this
technique doesn't quite work (or rather, it wouldn't be as useful as one might
imagine).


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answer