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Human Hibernation on the Horizon?
Mincemeat.net writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists at University of Washington have successfully induced a state of extreme hibernation in mice. The mice suffered no ill effects. Naturally, testing in larger animals will ensue. Humans wouldn't necessarily appreciate the smell of hydrogen sulfide while being placed into suspended animation. However, the applications are numerous if the usage of similar techniques can be applied to us. Cancer treatment, delaying death from injuries, interplanetary expeditions top the lists of possibilities. While it's not a quick freeze, maybe Fry will be able to meet Bender after all."
Injectable Hybernation. I'm sure this can't be abused in any way whatsoever.
Overcrowding and world hunger stem from people screwing the hell out of each other too much and having more babies they simply can't take care of and shouldn't be having in the first place.
Those that are alive currently take an infinite amount more of priority over those who are non-existant. It sounds like a poor attitude but it is correct.
If humans stopped producing more children and the starving in Africa, India and China died off then there wouldn't be as much problems. There would be no reason that those alive couldn't live long with a fountain of youth as we expand into the universe.
Using these in prisons?
Seems a bit better then the death penalty, would also actually make those 600 year jail sentences mean something =)
One day you go to jail, 5 years later you wake up anew.
Remind anyone of Demolition Man? Good because it should!
The solution to world problems like overcrowding and world hunger is not to let disease and ill health cut population down to size. That is simply barbaric in this day and age. As humanity progress, I believe we should seek social solutions for social problems rather than let nature prune our civilization as if we were a herd of hoofed herbavores. Otherwise, the whole lot of slashdot readers would have become extinct through vicious sexual selection preasures.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
It's funny that Futurama has the technological development of two distinct and competing technologies for longevity. Fry gets frozen in the chrogenics centre, wakes up in the future and, a few episodes later, discovers that celebrities live on as brains in jars. If we had the technology to keep a human brain alive and kicking I'd much prefer that to getting my head lopped off and frozen in the hope that a sufficiently advanced technology will one day be able to revive me. Even if it ment I had to spend the rest of my days as a body-less paraplegic in a wheelchair I think I'd rather that than to die from cancer.
Hybernation offers a third technology. Instead of lopping off my head at the first sign of cancer, you could put my body into hybernation and keep my brain active with regular stimulation. Hopefully you could do it by jacking me into a video game. I could handle living in MxO, as long as it was on a non-hostile server. Maybe I could even earn a living as a member of the Live Events team.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Our options really are to cut down the population or to increase the area we live in (unless we /want/ to live with 300 people per square nanometer). So, either let people die or explore space and colonize other planets and/or moons. I'm just pointing out which one we're more capable of.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Alright what's going on here.. several searches later I find the comments void of Bobba Fett jokes of any shape or size? What.. not even subtle nod towards carbonite, the fashionable substance that gave birth to advancements in stasis such as these?
Truly this is a dark day for Slashdotters everywhere...
Overpopulation is nonexistent as a problem in the developed world. If anything, the problem is going to be UNDERpopulation, especially for Europe with its ever-declining birthrates and strict immigration policies. If hibernation ever becomes possible there's not going to be a whole lot of people going into it in the poorest developing areas.
Or, we stop reproducing so much. It's really not that hard, and what's even better is that wealth appears to result in people having fewer children -- so as standards of living improve, population growth will slow. Europe already has negative population growth once you subtract out imigration, and the US is on its way.
at least airlines wont have to;
1. put up with idiotic customers
2. serve drinks and food
3. show entertainment
4. have good leg room
Just pack up em like cargo as tight as it can go.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you do a little math, you'll see that neither killing people nor exploring space are solutions to overpopulation.
The population is just growing too quickly. We get 75 million new people a year.
Let's start with the easy one -- space colonies. You can start exploring planets all you want, but unless you can figure out a way to ship off more than 75 million people a year, the population is still going to increase on Earth. Think about how many resources and man-hours are required to get seven people into LEO -- we couldn't reduce population by shipping people into space even if the whole world were united behind the project.
Next, let's talk war. Suppose you started a war that lasted a week and killed 1,000,000 people. That's a lot of people in a short amount of time -- it would be horrific. At the end of that week, you'd still have 430,000 more people than you started with! You could drag that war on for ten years, kill half a billion people (more than any war in history), and you'd still be way behind. Sure, you could pull out the nukes, but then you'd be reducing livable space and making a mess for the survivors.
The other thing you have to keep in mind is that many of the people saved by modern medicine are already past child bearing. The sort of people who could afford hiberation treatment would be in wealthy countries where the birth rate is low, anyway.
Everyone dies eventually, so killing a few adults off early doesn't change much in the long term balance sheet. The only practical way to do so is to alter the birth rate.
And one of the best ways to lower birth rates is to raise living standards and give people access to modern medical care (including contraceptives). When the mortality rate drops to some reasonable level and half the family isn't sick from malaria, you don't need to overproduce children just to make sure you'll have enough healthy members in the family.
It's also a lot more efficient for people to have a few healthy children than it is for them to spend resources raising a lot children only to have some large portion of them struck down by one of the four horsemen.
Only if the increase in living standards also comes with lower resource usage and/or lower waste production. Otherwise you end up transforming 100 people from a poor nation that use 100 unit of resource but will be 200 people using 200 units of resource in 10 years time into 100 people who use 500+ units of resource in 10 years time. Yes, you don't have any more people, but you are potentially in a worse position.
(This effect can be seen in China - birth rates have dropped but the effect of people wanting to drive cars rather than cycle may have some adverse effects on oil prices for a long time to come).
Someone may be uneducated or poor but this does not necessarily mean that their genetic stock is any worse. Some are of above average intelligence but have simply not had the combination of luck, opportunity or determination to move from the lower social strata to higher ones. Social mobility (defined in terms of financial outcome) in many Western nations (e.g. Britain, USA) is actually rather low and falling.
The truly mentally retarded are often in medicalised or institutionalised situations and have few offspring.
Is there a comprehensive study showing that those who are actually lacking in intelligence rather than education (and also those who are lacking in intelligence but well educated) breed more often?
Its not so much our body warning us, it's the result of millions of years of change. The people who hated the smell more, were less likely to go near it, (or other rotting things that smell similar) and so didn't get the negative effects... the people (and creatures) who liked it more, didn't get to reproduce as often.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
Someone may be uneducated or poor but this does not necessarily mean that their genetic stock is any worse.
Of course, there are many smart poor people, and there are many who are dumb but had the luck of being born in a higher social class. What I mean is, there is a significant correlation between intelligence+education and the social stratum.
And, the amount of offspring is inversely proportional to the social level.
The truly mentally retarded are often in medicalised or institutionalised situations and have few offspring.
Only in developed countries and only in better city districts.
There are villages in central Africa where the average IQ is around 40. It's not only the lack of education, but actual hereditary retardation of whole populations.
I can also spot similar cases on a lesser scale even in my home town. In this case, it's just my feeling rather than a scientific study, but I doubt those people can be degenerated to such a level purely because of the lack of education.
And these are the kind of people who tend to breed families of 10+ kids.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
However, the general point is correct, the increase of standard of living must come with lower resource usage. That goes especially for those currently burning through the majority of the resources.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Or it would just make it even harder to get rid of evil people with good networking skills. Right now, no matter how bad an evil dictator or tycoon is you can at least count on the fact that someday the bastard will die.
Any advance in longevity technologies will have to be accompanied by advances in assassin tech.
Aren't we already saving too many people who should be dead and thereby contributing greatly to world problems like overcrowding and world hunger and fun stuff?
Fair enough: drop dead.
You do not want to? Hm, funny. Neither do I.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I agree, although for different reasons. Concraception is not the reason that most postindustrial countries have low birth rates. For the most part, it is just more economically efficent to have many children in poor countries and less efficent to have children at all in wealthy countries.
If you live on a subsistence level, every child is another pair or hands to work the farm, or help out however. In the US, Europe, etc, a child is a drain on your resources for 18+ years. So you have fewer.
We do need to give access to concraceptives to deal with overpoplation, but if we just raise the standard of living, contraceptives, and economical pressure to use them, will follow.
"If we further restrict reproduction in less desirable persons, and mandate abortions when the deviate from national policies we can take care of the rest."
This was tried once, it's called eugenics. Throw in some race politics (there's still plenty of people out there that believe inbreeding somehow empowers you instead of producing ugly people with big ears and bad teeth), and you've got a perfect recipe for a Fourth Reich.
May I suggest that, in that light, China's one-child policy looks reasonable?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sorry it just isn't that simple. If it were then why did the U.S. birthrate PLUMET when the pill was introduced?
Having studied birthrates and the third world I can tell you what some studies have said.
First of all most Women is poor countries DON'T HAVE FARMS. These isn't little house of the prairie where a bunch of little helpers go out and milk the cows. They live in poverty with very little to provide sustenance. These women have children by the bushels for numerous reasons, but one of the most striking is a concept called numeracy. They don't have it. It is the concept of how many children one has, e.g. only child, 2, 3 then stopping. When you ask a woman is sub-saharran Africa how many children she wants she will reply with something like - "as many as god gives me" or "I don't know what you mean, as many as will come".
What most studies find about lowering birthrates in the thirdworld is an insanely simple answer: empower women. When women become empowered they begin to feel they can control their environment and by extension their reproduction.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
(sigh)
I don't know if you've noticed, but people require rather more than surface area to live. Like food, water, materials, and manufacturing facilities to build houses. As such, the whole "world's population could fit in Texas" meme going around is irrelevant at best.
But even leaving all that aside, we use a lot more space that just what's inside our houses. Notably, we have streets to get between houses and businesses (which also requires space). Even assuming that the world's populace could magic their way to Texas, it wouldn't be a suitable spot for a weekend convention, let alone permament habiation. And let's not forget that many people dislike sprawl on the relatively small scale of Las Vegas. Somehow I don't think a state-wide sprawl would cut it.
In the end, I may as well claim that the world's population would fit in Rhode Island. It's technically true, but not at all germane to the discussion of overpopulation.
1045 sq. mi. = 29.13 * 10^9 sq. feet
29.13 * 10^9 / 6.516 * 10^9 = 4.732 sq. feet/person
Hibernation would be stupid if you still die when you're 80... is there any research into whether or not it helps you to live longer?
brave new world was a dystopic nightmare future.
you did realize that right?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I've often thought this was a good idea, but ultimately always rejected it.
What if we inadvertently cull someone we would have needed later?
Take Stephen Hawking for example. Ameliotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (the diseas he has) is caused by a genetic defect.
I'd rather have a large gene pool with lots of genetic variation and a lot of bad genes than a tiny one with no bad genes.
Say a new virus comes along, there's a good chance SOMEONE will be immune/resistant to it given a large very diverse gene pool. Not so with a small gene pool where everybody is essentially the same.
Funny how culling the heard is more likely to lead to extinction than a perfect species on a long enough timeline.
I say we allow each couple that wants children to have at most two A replacement scheme...
Overpopulation is a problem and it's currently only going to get worse. We need to start controlling population growth now before it gets so bad we have to start sterilizing or killing people.
Question everything