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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.
Don't sweat the petty things. Don't pet the sweaty things. --Stephen J. Simmons
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.
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...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
I've always wondered why they dont send people who are use to sitting in a chair for months at a time. ;)
I know after I get HL2 I wont be on Slashdot for at least a week!
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).
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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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.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"