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Long-term cryogenic and hibernative sleep may be the key to getting humans to Mars — and beyond. But with research and funding active concerns, it may first come to a spa near you.
Our bodies aren't meant for space. It's heartbreaking for science fiction fans to hear, but it's also a self-evident fact. Our bodies require too much maintenance to speed through the stars. We need a steady supply of those things absent from space —namely water, food and oxygen. We crave warmth but won't find it in deep space, where the average temperature is minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit.
Even if we could survive in an icy vacuum without sustenance, we'd probably go insane without distractions and room to move. In 2013, participants in a 17-month Russian spaceflight simulation became depressed and lethargic in the cramped quarters. They grew desperate for privacy and often skipped exercises that would be crucial during a real spaceflight.
Ensuring space travellers stay healthy and active during long flights is a puzzle with two pieces: cargo and weight. Food, water, exercise equipment and televisions are heavy. Fuel is expensive and volatile. The more weight you're bringing into space, the more fuel you need. But aeronautic engineers (of SpaceWorks) believe they have found the key to solving that puzzle: put your space travellers to sleep.
https://vanwinkles.com/latest-science-of-cryogenic-sleep-human-hibernation-for-space-travel
[Also Covered By]: http://gizmodo.com/how-traveling-to-deep-space-in-cryogenic-sleep-could-ac-1725605323
[Related Blog]: http://spacetorpor.blogspot.com/
[Related NASA Coverage]: http://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habitat-for-human-stasis-to-mars/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:32PM
They're not going to survive, no matter what; that's the problem. It takes too long to get between star systems with our technology, and we don't even know how to build things which can last that long without significant repairs and overhauls. Without cryo-sleep, there's no way for anyone to survive the journey, so you need generation ships. Those require an incredible amount of energy to keep people alive (since you need to create a closed system where everything is recycled), and there's no sources of energy in interstellar space, so you have to bring it as fuel. We haven't developed fusion technology yet, so we don't have any viable method of actually creating enough energy in a way that's compatible with a spaceship, except maybe nuclear fission, but that would require massive shielding and also radiators (since nuclear power works on a Carnot cycle, getting energy from the differential between a hot fluid and a cold one, so all the heat generated by the reactor has to be exhausted into a vacuum, which requires a gigantic radiator since convection and conduction are useless there). Now you're looking at a huge ship which we simply don't have the technology to build; we can barely build tiny modular space stations in low-Earth orbit, and haven't even bothered building a permanent structure on the Moon, which is only 3 days away with late-60s technology. Finally, once you do get people out there in some kind of ship, they're going to be slowly killed by all the hard cosmic radiation, which our magnetosphere protects us from here on Earth. So you'll need even more shielding to protect against that unless you want everyone dying of cancer within a year or so.
Basically, if we want to send people on interstellar voyages, we need a lot more technology and infrastructure than we currently have. We need Moon and asteroid mining, space-based construction facilities (either orbital or at a Lagrangian point), probably a space elevator (at least one on the Moon, assuming it proves to be useful for mining materials needed for construction), and decades or more of actual experience building things out there. We haven't even gotten started, and we're wasting our time dreaming of colonizing Mars instead of developing practical capabilities.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:59PM
You're talking interstellar, but I'm thinking of just this solar system for now. From TFS, "may be the key to getting humans to Mars — and beyond" In my own estimation, it's going to take a couple hundred years, MINIMUM, to establish a presence throughout the solar system. We simply aren't ready to shoot for the stars - yet.
Given that we are going to spend a long time colonizing and settling the choicest real estate in this system, we may just stumble over the secrets of interstellar flight along the way. Wormholes? https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/08/22/020254 [soylentnews.org] Or, maybe an FTL drive. Or, an Ark. Or, as this article suggests, cryogenics. Or, some combination of these, or other ideas.
The stars will wait some more hundreds of years. First, we have to take the first baby step of colonizing a few bodies in this system.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday August 23 2015, @03:51AM
Ok, if you're talking about spending a couple hundred years in this system, there's a problem with that too: what do we do here?
Colonizing? None of the worlds in this system are worth colonizing, except maybe (maaayyybbeee) Venus. Some of them would be good for locating permanent bases on to support other work there (mining or construction mainly, also research, though you don't usually need a gigantic base with lots of people to support scientific research (mainly geology, in the case of other worlds); just look at the Antarctic bases for comparison). For actually living on just to live there? They all suck, and nothing's going to change that any time soon. I honestly don't know why there's such a push to colonize Mars; there's not much there. It has only 1/3g gravity, no real atmosphere to speak of, no magnetosphere, and no liquid water. The Moon sucks too, with only 1/6g gravity and no liquid water (but at least it's really close and probably has some stuff worth mining, so I'm all in favor of establishing a base there). Mercury is too hot (and small), the other 4 planets are gas giants, and all the other moons and dwarf planets are too small and too cold. Venus has a nice size with 0.9g gravity, but it's hot enough to melt lead and rains sulfuric acid. It is possible to have structures floating in the upper atmosphere though (where the temperature and atmospheric pressure are near Earth-normal), though I'm not sure what the economic incentive there would be.
If you're thinking of terraforming, it's flatly impossible to change the gravity of a world unless you somehow steer another world into it, or figure out how to artificially generate gravity. So Mars will never have enough gravity to really be comfortable for humans, and it's unknown now what the effects of low gravity are on the human body; we do know that microgravity (like on the ISS) is extremely damaging to humans. Astronauts lose a LOT of bone mass while up there, despite vigorous exercise every day to counteract it. I doubt 1/3g is going to avoid all of that. The Moon is even worse with only 1/6g, but at least it's so close (3 days trip) that people can do rotations there pretty easily; that's not so feasible with Mars being 6-18 months away. And back to Mars, even if you ignore the gravity problem (or it's not that much of a problem), there's no way to create a magnetosphere there, so no way to keep the atmosphere from blowing away if you figure out how to create one. Venus is really the only planet that makes sense to terraform, since it at least has the proper mass and size. But how? Any terraforming process there is going to take centuries if not longer to make a place at all human-habitable. In that time, you could go ahead and build interstellar ships and send them on voyages.
This is why we're looking for "habitable zone" planets in other star systems now. It'd be a lot easier to just find another planet that has conditions fairly close to Earth which would be more easily terraformed, than to try to work with the crappy worlds we have here in this system. But we have to go to other stars to find any likely candidates. But of course, getting there is a very difficult problem (and even then, it's hard to tell just how suitable a world for colonization they are without traveling there first; you can only see so much from a telescope).
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:35AM
Your questions are hard to answer. Gravity is the toughest part of all of it. Today, we don't have the capability to turn gravity up, or down. But - it could be in the immediate future, or it could be decades away, or hundreds of years.
Interesting article here: http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/ [gizadeathstar.com] Not especially informative, except for the fact that Boeing sees potential in the man's ideas, and the Russians are apparently pursuing the research.
There are many many google links to gravity research, few if any really informative, except that they hint at a lot of research in the field. Where governments and large corporations are spending tons of money, one can expect for things to happen, if only incrementally.
I was about to close the Google page, when I spotted SpaceX - - - ehhhh. The guy seems to combine elements of fact with elements of conspiracy theories, but here it is anyway - http://supersoldiertalk.com/2015/05/29/spacex-to-create-mars-colony-antigravity-technology-makes-possible-in-a-decade/ [supersoldiertalk.com]
Guess it's safe to say that I'm hopeful, regarding gravity research. The real problem is, virtually all research into gravity is aimed at creating a weapon, or a space drive. There doesn't appear to be any research into mundane uses, such as anchoring pregnant women to the floor of the base, so that gestation can proceed normally. As usual, the weapons will come first, then practical applications will come decades afterward.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday August 23 2015, @03:04PM
Guess it's safe to say that I'm hopeful, regarding gravity research. The real problem is, virtually all research into gravity is aimed at creating a weapon, or a space drive.
That's because if you figure out how to bypass gravity, you've probably also just figured out how to bypass lightspeed, and entered into a whole new realm of physics. Mundane uses aren't nearly as important as having FTL drive.
The problem with "gravity research" is that our understanding of physics has no allowance for changing gravity, or for exceeding lightspeed (without negative mass as in the Alcubierre Drive). It's not often that a real-world effect is found which isn't backed up by basic physics; normally the physics are worked out years or decades before the effect is found in nature.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:56AM
I just stumbled over this site: http://www.americanantigravity.com/about.html [americanantigravity.com]
Before that I browsed Youtube with various gravity search terms. Amongst an ass-ton of stupid crap, I found a couple rather interesting clips. Sorry, didn't copy the links, but if you enter "gravity" and "experiment" in combination with various other terms, some cool stuff pops up. I have no way of determining the veracity of any of those clips, of course.
Be warned - I had to watch a couple moronic videos long enough to decide that they were just occult nonsense with a Nazi Germany theme. Ugggh.