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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: 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.

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