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posted by Fnord666 on Friday June 23 2017, @04:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the nighty-night dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday June 23 2017, @08:31PM (4 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday June 23 2017, @08:31PM (#530220)

    Oh please. Biology is enormously complicated, it's true, but that doesn't make it impossible to modify it. We're already learning a lot about how the aging process works, and we have examples in nature of organisms which basically don't age such as the Hydra, and some trees:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence [wikipedia.org]
    http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150622-can-anything-live-forever [bbc.com]

    It might not be *that* hard for us to achieve biological immortality, at the cost of having to do some kind of regular treatment to sustain it. (After all, we and all other organisms evolve so that we require zero maintenance aside from things like grooming, and more complex organisms generally have limited repair abilities, all because they're assumed to be living in the wild without any advanced technology and the penalty for ageless cells is high susceptibility to cancer.)

    Finally, we still have no idea what really causes consciousness, and we certainly haven't been able to create any computers with consciousness, so we don't even know if that's possible. There's an implicit assumption that if you throw enough memory and computational power into something, that consciousness will somehow magically arise from this, but there's zero evidence of this.

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  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Friday June 23 2017, @10:08PM (1 child)

    by tftp (806) on Friday June 23 2017, @10:08PM (#530272) Homepage

    The deficiencies of water-and-protein based biology are well known; they are already slowing us down with the flight to Mars. These cells are fundamentally incompatible with requirements of the new humanity that is based in space. The life support system will be too large and too fragile to sustain, say, on or around Pluto. It may be prohibitively expensive, mass/volume-wise, to small mining or personal transport ships. Digitization of human mind creates infinite possibilities that a biological container, no matter how improved, will ever approach. For example, biological immortality within one body is not good enough - the body can be destroyed at any time. True immortality requires multiple synchronized copies of the live mind, so that loss of one copy is not more significant than loss of one hair today.

    You claim that the nature of consciousness is still a secret. It is. But at least we have a fairly straightforward path to learning that secret - throw more simulated neurons at the problem! It's much harder to reverse-engineer the cell at the molecular level and then modify it (if that is even possible) to achieve the desired characteristics. At some point you will say "hell, this code is junk, it's cheaper and faster to rewrite it from scratch using this|that framework."

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday June 24 2017, @01:15AM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday June 24 2017, @01:15AM (#530367)

      I honestly don't see the point in all this. Uploading your mind into a computer isn't likely to produce an actual conscious being (and it wouldn't be "you" anyway, it'd be a clone), but worse than that, you wouldn't even be human any more, so what's the point? Just so you can go live on some crappy ice-ball of a planetoid so far from the Sun that it has barely any light at all? Why would you want to do this?

      If you want to live offworld, it's actually pretty easy to do without having to go to such measures, and being able to retain your humanity (though achieving biological immortality, or at least a longer lifespan, would still be nice): just build space stations. There's effectively infinite space in the Solar System in Earth's orbit or thereabouts, and all you have to do is make large stations which rotate. Give them thick enough shielding (possibly even EM shielding) to deal with radiation, and the rotation will give you artificial gravity at 1.0g if that's what you want. It's a closed system and fully artificial, so you can duplicate Earth-normal conditions and habitats all you want: put in an area with a forest, for instance. You won't be limited by problems with some other planet/moon like lack of gravity or atmosphere. For the materials to build these giant stations, you just have to mine asteroids or maybe the Moon. And by being able to build it however you want, and populate it with whatever organisms you want, you won't be wishing you were still on Earth while looking at some bleak landscape on another world because you've recreated it in your station.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 23 2017, @10:29PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday June 23 2017, @10:29PM (#530278) Journal

    We are like cars. Maintain the cars, run forever.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:07AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:07AM (#530414)

    Do you know that we haven't created computers with consciousness? Just because they're not talking to you doesn't mean they're not self-aware. I wouldn't be surprised for modern networks of computers to be recognized as "organized intelligence" like an anthill or termite colony, if people wanted to press the analogy.

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