Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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();