SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Is human hibernation possible? Can we do it long enough to survive a long-duration spaceflight journey and wake up again on the other side?
[...] medicine is already playing around with human hibernation to improve people's chances to survive heart attacks and strokes. The current state of this technology is really promising.
They use a technique called therapeutic hypothermia, which lowers the temperature of a person by a few degrees. They can use ice packs or coolers, and doctors have even tried pumping a cooled saline solution through the circulatory system. With the lowered temperature, a human's metabolism decreases and they fall unconscious into a torpor.
But the trick is to not make them so unconscious that they die. It's a fine line.
The results have been pretty amazing. People have been kept in this torpor state for up to 14 days, going through multiple cycles.
[...] Current plans for sending colonists to Mars would require 40 ton habitats to support 6 people on the trip. But according to SpaceWorks, you could reduce the weight down to 15 tons if you just let them sleep their way through the journey. And the savings get even better with more astronauts.
The crew probably wouldn't all sleep for the entire journey. Instead, they'd sleep in shifts for a few weeks. Taking turns to wake up, check on the status of the spacecraft and crew before returning to their cryosleep caskets.
What's the status of this now? NASA funded stage 1 of the SpaceWorks proposal, and in July, 2016 NASA moved forward with Phase 2 of the project, which will further investigate this technique for Mars missions, and how it could be used even farther out in the solar system.
[...] When humans freeze, ice crystals form in our cells, rupturing them permanently. There is one line of research that offers some hope: cryogenics. This process replaces the fluids of the human body with an antifreeze agent which doesn't form the same destructive crystals.
Scientists have successfully frozen and then unfrozen 50-milliliters (almost a quarter cup) of tissue without any damage.
Why limit therapeutic hypothermia to space travel? Use it to get through a visit with your in-laws.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 23 2017, @07:46PM (5 children)
Second, as in the example of the space ship, it allows for the possibility of large numbers of people inhabiting the same space. I recall a science fiction story where the world's population was divided into sevenths. Each portion spent one day of the week awake while the other six groups slept.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:57AM
Dayworld [wikipedia.org] - short story degenerating in a trilogy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:35PM (3 children)
Seems like a losing proposition to me unless you think the future will get much better very quickly.
The problem is that you're basically throwing away life to get further into the future. I mean, if they could slow aging fourfold while in hibernation, with no adverse effects, then it would still cost you 10 years of your life to be "magically" transported forty years into the future. Go to sleep at age 30 today, wake up at age 40 in 2057. Kinda steep price to throw away the youngest years of your remaining life unless there's something *really* promising coming over the horizon.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 24 2017, @06:59PM (2 children)
Well, one thing that's coming is longer life spans. Currently, it's rather slow increase, something like a year increase from birth every decade. But there's reason to expect that to get better in the future when we actual develop technologies that would help. Second, 40 years of investments would be a huge increase. For example, before taxes, investing in the NASDAQ would have generated a return of more than a factor of ten over the past forty years adjusted for inflation.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:49PM (1 child)
Doesn't matter how long your life is - so long as you're not immortal it will be the most desirable years of youth you're throwing away.
As for investments, I rather suspect you'd wake up in 40 years to discover that the investors who *didn't* sleep through it will have maneuvered regulations to prevent corpsicles from concentrating all the profits.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 26 2017, @12:26AM
You could always wake up every few years to review the current state of regulation. You'd still get 40 years in without the massive gamble of hoping the world was good to you.