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Hibernating to Mars
neutron_p writes "Manned missions beyond the Moon are no longer wild dreams. NASA plans a manned mission to Mars before 2020. With automatic systems in control, astronauts would face the challenge of living in a confined space with not much to do for an extremely long period. 'Might as well sleep it off!' Studies initiated by ESA have gone one step further. Wouldn't it be nice if astronauts could hibernate! ESA biologists are conducting investigations into the physiological mechanisms that mammals use to hibernate."
Believe it or not, Science Fiction isn't the same as Science Fact. Ever see those clips of astronauts constantly exercising? They need to do that keep up their muscles out of atophy. If muscles will atophy for an otherwise active astronaut, don't you think they'll get even worse for a hibernating astronaut? The issue of hibernating isn't as easy as it seems. Biologists today don't even fully understand animal hibernation on earth.
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Stories like this illustrate why people who say things like "why are we spending all this money on space when we have so many problems to solve here on Earth" need to rethink their arguments. Not only would true hibernation open up voyages to destinations much farther away than Mars, but being able to put humans into hibernation would have enormous medical implications -- imagine hibernating through surgery, or in the case of something incurable, being put into hibernation (thus, persumably, greatly slowing the process of the disease) until a cure is found. Also, the advances necessary to acheive this would lead to a much better understanding of human biology generally, with attendant medical advances we can't necessarily imagine at this point.
The usual counterargument to this is, "But if we spent the money studying ___ for its own sake, we would make the same discoveries, without the overhead of space flight!" This misses the point, IMO; we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't. Space exploration has provided the justification for some of the most important research the world has ever seen -- the reason "space-age technology" has fallen out of favor as an advertising slogan is because the stuff is now so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that we no longer think about its origins -- and clearly continues to do so.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Reliability - people can sleep in shifts, and not hibernate for the entire time.
Reality - 2020 is more than 15 years from now. What has no useful results now may in 15 years. (It was considered bad form to operate on the heart thirty years ago, and now it's routine.)
The hard way - everything is done the hard way. Every pioneering effort is. It will continue to be that way, and we either suck it up and do it, or we don't. I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
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'Manned missions beyond the Moon are no longer wild dreams. NASA plans a manned mission to Mars before 2020.'
Manned missions to Mars are right up there with moon bases and flying cars in the "I've heard that one before" stakes. Wake me when they have the spacecraft on the launch pad. I won't hold my breath.
How about muscle atrophy? If I slept for six months straight, you can be damn sure that I'd have a hell of a time getting out of bed in the morning. Astro/Cosmonauts on the ISS have enough trouble as it is when they return to the planet and they're always doing stuff while on their mission to include working out!
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By "the hard way" I meant going to Mars with existing tech. 15 years is a long time in "computer years", but something like long-term hibernation is going to take at least a decade to to work out the bugs because every test is going to have to run at least a few months in order to have meaning. Even if they were to come up with something that works tomorrow, it would be pushing to make it practical by 2020. Sleeping in shifts might help (a la 2001), but that would further complicate things.
Lots of things need to be done before we go to Mars; we need far more durable, reliable and usable pressure suits, a life-support system that can run for three (minimum) years without spare parts from Earth, some sort of rover that can go more than a couple klicks, actual studies of the effects of long term exposure to low-gravity, etc. etc. Suspended animation will be useful, someday, but...
Yes, computers, robotics, medicine, and other technologies have come a long way in a short time, but there's no gaurantee that the growth will continue; aircraft technology went from none 100 years ago to jets in the 50's, but it took another 50 years (and the X-prize) to kick things up a notch... Progress can be linear, but it doesn't have to be.
A bit cynical, I know, but I've been disappointed by NASA for 30 years now; I watched Armstrong set foot on the moon when I was eight and was told that we'd be on Mars by the mid-80's. By the time I got out of high school, we were trapped in LEO by the shuttle. Things like this worry me because they can keep us waiting for a "perfect" solution for a loooong time...
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I've always wondered why they dont send people who are use to sitting in a chair for months at a time. ;)
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Sleeping it off sounds like a great idea, if only muscle loss could be stopped during the rest period. Astronauts already have a hard enough time keeping in shape for their ride home when they're awake.
As a person who has had multiple open heart surgeries, let me contradict the previous post. Open heart surgery has been practiced and studied by multiple organizations in america, since the wooden prosthetics of the 1700's. It was never bad form to operate on the heart as there had never been any "elective" surgeries that ppl could choose to have AFAIK. When you get told you have to have open heart surgery, let me tell you, YOU WANT TO GET OUT OF IT. All surgeries relating to the heart are considered necessary as certain tissues have the consistency of wet toilet paper (aortic valve for example).
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> It has always amazed me that so many animals hiberate, but we can figure out how to translate that into humans.
I think there's been some work on studying hibernation, but even if we get a really good understanding of how it works, that doesn't mean that we can translate it to humans easily. A crude comparison would be to say that since we now how birds fly we should be able to make humans fly... There are genetically coded mechanisms in place that allow for hibernation and it's not trivial to recreate those mechanisms without the genes in place.
Also hibernation implies that there is still metabolic activity, but it's slower than normal. For an organ to be hibernation, you would still need to provide it oxygen and nutrients, just at a much lower rate than you normally would.
Not to say that it can't be done, but we are far from hibernation for humans and even farther from true metabolic suspension (which no animals do).
Yea but hard radiation shielding is really the problem. Sure we can pack a bunch of Al or some other material around a enclosed area and keep out the energetic ions both from solar events and from cosmic rays but what about the neutrons? We simply have to way to stop the neutrons and packing a lot of shielding around the sleeping area will no doubt increase the number of neutrons that the travelers would absorb. Talk about keeping them busy during flight is a nice discussion for Martha Stewart but the one of the hard core science questions (besides how to get back off the Martian surface) is how to keep them from getting cancer during the trip.
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I can second that. I've been told I might need open heart surgery someday due to a perforated aortic valve, and I do indeed want to get out of it. It's scary as hell. You have my respect and sympathy for making it through.
Funny you should mention the consistency of "wet toilet paper." I had an infection (endocarditis) that burned a tiny, 1-2mm, hole in my valve. If the hole gets larger I may need surgery. I was wondering about the odds of that occurring, so I asked my cardiologist about the consistency of the aortic valve. He compared it to chicken skin - very thin but tough. "Wet toilet paper" doesn't sound so good.
Either way, the aortic valve is one nasty point-of-failure for the human body.
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I'm a lot more interested in great new nuclear propulsion technologies than figuring out some way to pass the time.
Once we have a quick round-trip propulsion system, routine flights might be possible, opening up all kinds of possibilities.
Also, if we have a powerful propulsion system, it does start opening up even more far-flung expeditions, like unmanned long-term trips outside the solar system even.
Of course, IANARS.
We've been hearing stories about sustainable living on Mars for awhile now, and now hibernating to Mars. Until it happens right here on Earth, it's vaporware. Nobody's hibernating, and nobody has built a successful closed-system biosphere. Send three Martianauts off to Mars for 5 years anytime in the next 15, and someone will win the pool because their chosen date will be the closest to when the last one breathing decides to take the white pill.
Record deficits, robots already exploring... c'mon people, get realistic. Our hundreds of billions of dollars are going toward Roman Empire fantasies and paying off the costs of occupying other countries, not manned space travel.
Indeed they also fashioned wooden valves. What would suck would be to have a wooden heart valve that, even if an implant was successful, would simply corrode and fail in a few weeks. But as far as medicine goes, it was a noble effort. Better to operate on 10 patients who wouldnt last 2 days, have a 20% success rate resulting in patients that die later that month. Is a treatment that's fatal worth the extra few days when faced with certain death sooner? Whatever it takes.
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