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Sub-Zero Squirrels
DesertFalcon writes "There's a Wired article about squirrels in the Arctic whose body temperatures drop below freezing when they hibernate. Scientists have the goal of applying this to humans in the long run. Could this be the answer to problems with long-distance space travel?" We had a previous story on this.
Must be a different type of supercooling than I know about. Any disturbance would cause the supercooled liquid to freeze.
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These ground squirrels are probably deeply adapted in multidimensional ways to the low temperatures. In contrast, the biochemical pathways of people are all tuned to operate at normal body temperature. I doubt that there is an easy way to make the human body hiberate at low temperature. Too many systems would be affected or thrown out-of-balance by the cold.
/. already). Helping astronauts retain bone mass during zero-G would involve a less severe chemical rejiggering than creating full-fledged cold-body hibernation.
Nonetheless, we can learn from hibernating animals. One area that may be promising is how bears maintain bone density during hibernation (pardon my potential redundancy if this was posetd on
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Your system has a bunch of different ways of handling cells that have DNA errors. There are some systems for actually repairing your DNA and there are systems for recognizing (and destroying) cells with lots of problems (this is a large part of what a sunburn is).
All the techniques depend on your cells operating normally. If you hibernate for six months, presumably metabolism is slowed and those processes will slow. That means that your normal radiation repair functions will be inhibited and you'll be more likely to wake up with the precursors to cancer.
Not good...
I suppose, if you're out cold (literally) then you could be out cold in a tiny little chamber with some walls with a lot of mass. But those won't block everything. You have to wonder how an awake person in your average double-hulled, water-filled-gap space ship (which doesn't exist yet) will fare against the side of beef in the thickwalled freezer over the long run.
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