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: 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.