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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: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 23 2017, @05:07PM (4 children)
There's a less complicated approach. Use the enzyme that causes mammals to go into hibernation. It's not freezing but lowers metabolic needs and lowers heart rate so the person saves on the life time used up.
The problem with freezing is the complication with ice crystals and going into or out of this state. Never mind handling that properly inside cramped conditions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday June 23 2017, @05:30PM (3 children)
The problem, I think, is that there's no consistent enzyme used by all mammals to hibernate - hibernation is something that evolved independently many times. And in species that never evolved hibernation, the systems are not designed to handle it gracefully, if at all.
An alternative option is to gank them with hydrogen sulfide, which *all* mammals respond to by entering a low-metabolic state (presumably because there have been several global hydrogen sulfide atmospheric events, and all present-day mammals are descended from those who managed to survive them). There's actually been a lot of research into it's use for battlefield medicine, since you can render the body almost completely inert and then revive it consistently, extending the "critical-care window" from minutes to a day or more.
The down side is that it only works for the body - the brain begins to suffer permanent damage almost immediately. Still, it seems promising if you could, for example, put in circulatory bypass units for the head so that it's running on clean, normally oxygenated blood. Put it into as deep a sleep as possible while taking the more robust body down to the edge of death.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Friday June 23 2017, @06:16PM
I was happily going along with you, right until you smacked me in the face with the harsh reality of being taken...
Guess I'm Earth bound until I get over that bump.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:03AM (1 child)
Hydrogen Sulfide gas makes you dumb:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/074823379501100206 [sagepub.com]
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?p=AONE&sw=w&issn=00384348&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA105965406&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=fulltext&authCount=1&isAnonymousEntry=true [galegroup.com]
The rural counties around here pump household water from the ground with heavy hydrogen sulfide content... I could also say something about these counties' political preferences, but that's just too cheap and easy.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:26PM
Yes, that is generally the most obvious effect of the permanent brain damage I mentioned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @05:16PM (9 children)
I was working 20 hour days, sleeping 4 hours per night Monday through Friday, and sleeping 36 hours straight through Saturday and Sunday. Then I died.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday June 23 2017, @05:19PM (8 children)
SoylentNews is the afterlife, eh? Enjoy your stay... forever.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @05:24PM (1 child)
Don't cremate me.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday June 23 2017, @09:16PM
Done and done!
oooooh, you said "DON'T".
oooops.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday June 23 2017, @05:46PM
Good effort but you forgot the "Hoo hoo hoo-hoo, hoo hoo hoo-hoo, ha haa haaa haaahhrrrrrrrr!"
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Funny) by zocalo on Friday June 23 2017, @06:00PM (3 children)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @06:10PM (2 children)
Yes, SN is Hell. The evidence is everywhere: Phoenix666, Fnord666, aristarchus the ancient greek who lived and died thousands of years ago, a mighty buzzard will eat your boobies for eternity, the flaming lake of ethanol is always fueled.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday June 23 2017, @09:17PM
Aaaaaand. Loving it.
--Maxwell Smart
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:51AM
(grin)
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday June 23 2017, @06:35PM
I guess Christians were right, the afterlife truly is an eternity of suffering and pain.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 23 2017, @05:57PM (7 children)
This is asking for the mother of all DVTs, probably in a lot of different places.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 23 2017, @06:40PM (6 children)
If medical technology can't handle that, we have no business going interstellar.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday June 23 2017, @07:58PM (5 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday June 23 2017, @08:31PM (4 children)
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.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday June 23 2017, @10:08PM (1 child)
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
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
We are like cars. Maintain the cars, run forever.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:07AM
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.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday June 23 2017, @06:35PM
Why limit therapeutic hypothermia to space travel? Use it to get through a visit with your in-laws.
'Cause being on Mars is a GREAT excuse to avoid those visits altogether!
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday June 23 2017, @07:45PM (1 child)
You'd willingly be asleep when in the vicinity of your inlaws? You must have a good relationship with them.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:54AM
You'd willingly be asleep when in the vicinity of your inlaws? You must have a good relationship with them.
Of course I have a good relationship with them.
Ever since I moved them in the freezer room while they were sleeping.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(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/@ProfSteveKeen 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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jdavidb on Friday June 23 2017, @08:07PM
Or use it to survive an FDA trial of the drug that will eventually save your life. Just wait till all the other suckers I mean volunteers have demonstrated the drug's effectiveness or not.
Oh, wait. [xkcd.com]
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @08:43PM (10 children)
I jus' wanna get through Trump's bullshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @11:17PM (9 children)
What makes you think he'll last 8 years, let alone 4?
My betting is that he'll be impeached before his first term is up.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday June 24 2017, @01:39AM (6 children)
It'll be even worse if he's impeached, because then Pence would be President. Pence favors even more regressive policies, and he's actually competent unlike Trump. The last thing we need is for Trump to get impeached, unless somehow both Pence and Ryan get impeached at the same time (since Ryan is #3, though I'll admit he's probably not as bad as Pence).
So the OP's sentiment isn't wrong: even if Trump gets impeached, he's definitely going to want to sleep through the next 4 years at a minimum, and likely 8 because Presidents almost *always* get re-elected in modern history. The only exceptions I can think of are, in reverse order, Carter (1 term), Ford (was never elected for Pres or VP, lost re-election bid), LBJ (sorta: he assumed JFK's position, was re-elected once in '64, but was so unpopular in '68 he dropped out early), JFK (assassinated in 1st term), Coolidge (assumed Harding's position when he died; re-elected once for his own term, didn't want to run for a 2nd), Harding (died in his 1st term), and finally Taft, to look at only the 20-21st centuries. Out of those, only 3 actually lost their re-election bids (4 if you count LBJ who dropped out very early). Coolidge was popular and would have won if he had run again. So based on this, the odds of Trump losing his re-election are not very good.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 24 2017, @12:40PM (4 children)
Hard to believe this argument has legs.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:08PM (3 children)
In other words, out of the last 19 presidents, 7 didn't serve two full terms.
No, it's only 3 or 4. The other ones don't count, because we're talking about the chances for Trump getting re-elected; in those other cases the President died (JFK: assassination, Harding: sickness) or simply declined to run again (Coolidge). I guess we can count LBJ because he wanted to run again but bowed out early when it was obvious he'd lose. So 4 out of 19 (or even 4 out of 16 if we just disqualify those others) is still not very good odds if you want Trump to lose: that's at best a 25% chance he'll lose. Basically, a President needs to be *really* unpopular to lose his re-election bid, usually because the economy is doing poorly. Remember, the economy wasn't exactly booming in 2012 when Obama ran for re-election (though it was doing better than in '08) and he still won fairly easily.
Hard to believe this argument has legs.
How so? It's completely true: Pence is more regressive than Trump, and he is a competent politician unlike Trump.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 24 2017, @05:02PM (2 children)
No, it is 7. Those other reasons count. For example, if Trump should die in office early enough, he sure isn't going to be running for reelection.
Because your reasons aren't persuasive. Regressive is not necessarily bad. And Pence may not actually be more competent, should that ever be a concern.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 26 2017, @02:27PM (1 child)
No, it is 7. Those other reasons count. For example, if Trump should die in office early enough, he sure isn't going to be running for reelection.
No, those other reasons do not count. The question that was posed is, how likely is Trump to win a re-election? Him dying in office does not count for "not winning a re-election", it's just a totally different case that doesn't apply to the question. The whole point here is to debate if Trump is popular enough to win his re-election bid, or not. If he dies from a heart attack because he eats too much fast food, then we won't get to find out if he would have won or not, it would be moot. So NO, those other cases do not count.
Regressive is not necessarily bad.
How so? Unless you're a religious nut who hates gays, a white supremacist, you don't believe in science, or you hate poorer people, regression is always bad.
And Pence may not actually be more competent
That one I'll accept as a valid argument, but I don't think I'm wrong. Trump hasn't shown any signs of competence so far, in fact very much the opposite, with so many government positions left unfilled (like in the State Dept, and the FBI director post). Pence at least has actual experience in government, and actual experience in an executive position (governor of IN), even if his record there was terrible. Now I could be wrong of course: Trump at least, to his credit, said some things about these GOP healthcare bills that indicate he may be moderate on that issue and that he didn't like those bills, but he's always telling people what they want to hear so we'll see what he really signs (or vetoes). I'm convinced Pence would be perfectly happy to just repeal Obamacare and go back to the bad ol' days of pre-existing conditions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 27 2017, @12:08AM
So you're saying that if Trump died tomorrow, he would be just as likely to win reelection as if he lived for the next four years? One must count relevant factors.
Further, the point of this evaluation of Trump's reelection chances is because some hypothetical snowflake wants to know whether they should wake up in four years or eight. Trump's chance of dying is quite relevant to the actual problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:16PM
You forgot Bush 41
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:00AM
You keep telling yourself that. I wish he'd become Caesar (celebrities already calling for assassination) for the next Augustus, the republic currently is a farce.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:00AM
You recon the Reps will find a viable candidate so soon?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford