How can a person be kept alive while being periodically drained of blood?
I have invented a large machine that allows me to create monsters out of blood. These monsters are called golems and are very powerful. My plan is to produce a large number of them to include in my army for world conquest. To accomplish this, I must acquire live humans to sacrifice to this machine.
The process requires a large amount of blood in order to create one golem. The human body is capable of losing up to 40% of blood before immediately dying from hemorrhaging, which works out to around 3 to 4 pints of blood. Thirteen humans at a time (the max amount) are placed inside this machine and hooked up to it through a series of tubes and wires. They are periodically drained to the maximum that their bodies can take, being kept alive by artificial processes. This provides up to 50 pints in total, after which they are given time to recover their blood supply until the next drain. This procedure happens until a victim expires and need to be replaced by new materials.
I want to create the largest amount of golems I can get while keeping each batch of victims alive for as long as possible to get the most mileage out of them. How can I make this happen?
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1 answer
How can a person be kept alive while being periodically drained of blood?
The way the question is framed by the context that you've given leads me to show this:
My answer is speculative and in no way meant as a criticism, as I'm not familiar with the nature of the world that you're creating. My answer comes from a scientific standpoint, because I do.
Stage 1
While this could be done by parasitising on the available population - keeping them like battery hens, whilst (as has appeared in other answers) force-feeding necessary nutrition and perhaps developing steroidal type drugs to increase the production of blood components in the individuals - such as Erythropoietin - A person can be kept alive indefinitley. All this is true, but not as part of an effective workforce - they'd need constant medical care, automated or not, using much equipment, resources, many person hours and engendering much resentment, heartache, disgust, social-outrage and potential unrest leading to.. who knows what? Which will need to be policed, and a huge PR. team to manage it, if it can be managed - without civil-war.
The "How can a person be kept alive" part of your question may become compromised, as a civil-war claims a lot of lives.
Depending on your world, this would appear to be an inefficient use of people and resources.
As I understand your objectives, the growth and maintenance of the size of the army is the key. Population numbers and available resources would limit production of your army, the more blood you take, the weaker the population becomes and the less food/arms they can produce - and the less energy they would have in total to put towards population growth (and therefore production of your army). Therefore the greater the chances your enemy will win and kill those you wish to keep alive.
Meanwhile your scientists and technicians are working on a more efficient solution:
Stage 2
Industrialisation.
This can ultimatley save a lot of lives. People are put to work in the business of making blood but not necessarily to the detriment of their health.
Great vats containing artificially created biologically compatible scaffolding seeded with the marrow of the strongest and healthiest of your people are being used to generate vast artificial bone-marrow reservoires, these are fed by tubes and pipes, constantly circulating oxygen, nutrients removing and filtering waste and generating a constant supply of precious blood.
This frees your population to grow and produce more resources to feed the vats and increase your civilisation's reserves and chances of survival. Specifically it benefits all individuals who would have otherwise been used to produce blood - being kept on the brink of exhaustion and death - they can now live productive lives towards your goals.
In times of extremis, if the war is going badly, you could cull the prison population/elderley/infirm/political opponents - depending how ethical the leadership is.
Of course voluntary (or compulsory) donations would still be welcome (demanded) as long as people don't become anaemic to the point that they can't work.
The but.
Who will get to mass production first, yourself or a competing faction/group?
If not yourself, then those individuals otherwise kept alive may die in the ensuing conflict.
Phase 1 would potentially be vulnerable to the introduction of pathogens that cause anaemia, by enemy spies into the general population. This could be detrimental to those individuals amd to total blood production under that regime.
Similarly both Phase 1 and 2 would be vulnerable to attack on the production facility itself, and any such attack would potentially have collateral damage. Swings and roundabouts, war is costly in lives.
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