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Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next
ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."
Don't they watch movies? Haven't we learned anything?
One of the biggies in this war is Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) - surviving explosions, surviving shots to the helmet - I wonder if we'll be swapping out a lot of dead soldiers for ones suffering extreme brain injury.
A friend of mine just came back from Germany. He lost both of his legs and has TBI caused mood swings like you wouldn't believe, and pretty much looks like it will wreck his family. Staving off death is one thing (and good); making life after injury worth living is another.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Most of these types of experiments have previously been in cryo-preservation - some scientist, in Boston I believe, has successfully frozen beagles, and brought them back to life.
Anyway, In trauma surgery, the "Golden Hour" refers to the window of time, where massively injured patients can be saved from horrible injuries. After that, too much damage occurs, and the chance is severely diminished.
So using H2S(hydrogen sulphide) should help stop oxidative reactions, extending the "Golden Hour", allowing the patient to be stabilized, and brought to a higher level of care, where they can be fixed up.
Small side effect - H2S is basically the stench in Marsh gas, so these soldiers are going to smell like stink ass zombies for a while I think.
..........FULL STOP.
Not to be confused with their re-animator project, which saw only mild success. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BnOUOkcr9c
One of the main mechanisms for brain damage after injury to the brain is due to the neurons releasing their packets of neurotransmitters upon their death. So you have a good neuron right next to a big blob of toxic neurotransmitters. Then that neuron dies, too. It's a chemical cascade of dying neurons. Slowing down metabolism slows down this damage, as oxidation plays a large part. Ever see those people that drown in icy water, only to be revived after hours without oxygen, somewhat intact? Same thing.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
They are going to end up with bacon that doesn't die! And that would be a sin against humanity!
My buddies and I have always postured what we would do if and when a zombie apocalypse broke out. All being military or former military, with the ability to bear arms and the survival skills (not to mention the remote getaway) already at our disposal, we all voted the human race as generally despicable and that it was about time there was some event to clean the slate. It's time to kick zombie ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all outa gum.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
The terminology seems odd here. Isn't suspended animation pretty much the opposite of being a zombie? I mean zombies are the animated dead. Suspended animation makes you the unanimated living.
Excellent, and we will call this new compound "The T-Virus"
That sounds like heaven on earth if you ask me.
In fact, I think this could be the basis for a new religion with a communion that doesn't let you down in the flavor department.
I'm afraid they'll have to find a soldier who can kick unusually high before they can try this experiment. And, if they get out of line, the CO will have to explain to them "You are confused."
Jean-Claude van Damme: "I am confused."
Similar to the upcoming US election results
What's the next advancement... do we find a battlefield-tested way to drain their blood and freeze-dry them for convenient transport? First zombies, and then vampires? I'm growing more garlic and saplings, just in case.
Bravo, sir. Never has the 'Anonymous Coward' moniker been more deserved...
Didn't you ever play Alpha Centauri? They call those Genejack Factories.
Wow, that war over in Germany is still going on? I thought it was over like 50 years ago...
I always knew squirrels were vicious little demons from hell.
Squirrely Wrath!
Squirrely Wrath!
Squirrely Wrath!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The Larramans Organ and Sus-An Membrane are far behind.
Really, this is how I see medicine in the future. If you suffer serious trauma, the paramedics will simply kill you at the scene and take your corpse to a hospital where the doctors will patch you up and resurrect you several hours later. If your hand gets mangled, they will simply hack it off, slather on some stem cells, and you'll over a few months, you'll just grow a new one.
darpa is defiantly going to be the government organization to incite the zombie apocalypse. though i shouldn't say that to loud considering the made the internet.....
Damn. I just finished rereading Doctorow's after the siege: http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html "That much she knew and that much they all knew: without the zombies, the revolution would never have come. Zombiism and the need to cure it had outweighed every other priority. Three governments had promised that they'd negotiate better prices for zombiism drugs and three governments had failed, and in the end the Cabinet had been overrun by zombies who'd torn three MPs to bits and infected seven more, and the crowd had carried the PM out of her office and put her in a barrel and driven nails through it and rolled it down the river-bank into the river, something so horrible and delicious that Valentine often thought about it, like you poke a sore tooth with your tongue."
Couldn't this be tweaked and used as a method of hibernation to stave off boredom and conserve supplies for long duration space flight?
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They have socialized medicine over there; the wait time is a bitch!
(For government health care, but I couldn't pass up the joke even so)
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This sounds less like reanimated corpses craving brains and more like the drugs Simon gave to River so he could sneak her into the hospital on Ariel in Firefly.
That is effectively what the Israleites did. Men of this village wanted to marry the Jewish women. The Jewish men, said OK, but to that you must be circumcised. The village men lined up and had it done, retired to their beds to sleep it off, and were killed by the Jewish men. I forget the name of the story, but it's in the Old Testament.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
From the write up:
If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam
So where does the bacon and spam come from the Pigs or the Zombie soldiers? :-/
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Wow, whats with the missing tag? if any story ever deserves the "what could possibly go wrong" tag...
In the year 2010 , the military performed the last of their life support experiments on Captain William "Buck" Rogers.
In a freak mishap he was lost...only to be found 500 years later.
There's really no down side to this..if we can't bring them back, then then they can work at McKinsey or Bain.....
What war in the last 50 years has been worth dying in? In which conflict in the last 50 years has the existence of the US been utterly threatened?
What war has ever been, in and of itself, worth dying in? You're asking the wrong question. The question is whether there have been any causes worth dying for in the last 50 years, and that answer is always, always "yes" to someone. War is rarely fought for clearcut reasons such as survival. You haven't read your history very closely if you think relative security has a direct relation to peace.
Fallacious reasoning. We can do both. Do we want to pay for both? I think we should, given that the shitty little conflicts we've been in are largely driven by politicians attempting to appear as though they're hardasses at the expense of the working class.
That's only practical because we enjoy a significant technological edge over our enemies, mostly because we employ a far larger budget. I'm not sure it's safe to assume that will always be the case, though. The last part of your statement (about the politicians) is true, but that's always been the case. The vast majority of wars are not fought for objectively noble reasons; most of them are at some level affairs of vanity.
In a low-tech, low-cost, grunts-with-guns battle, sure. All you want is for more of your guys to survive, and you've won. Soldiers in these armies are easily replaceable: give a gun to a civilian, drill them 'till they lose the use of independent thought, and you've replaced the dead soldier.
But modern armies are high tech, and that means that there is a lot of training invested in the men on the ground. Lose them, you lose all the training and experience that they had. So keeping them alive and possibly able to fight again is a big plus.
I realize this is a bit of a troll, but I'd like to point out that field hospitals, medics, and battlefield treatment have existed in some form or another at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire over two millennia ago, and indeed the Romans in particular had extensive knowledge of herbs and medicine in general. I'm fairly sure that this isn't exactly a new concept, here, but if you'd rather people died on the field of honour rather than keeping casualties to a minimum where possible, then hey, you're welcome to go fight in Iraq or Afghanistan and deny receiving medical attention when an unseen IED or RPG ambush blows apart your convoy because "in war people die".
It's true that people die in war, but that doesn't mean the number of people who do die can't be reduced. Should development of UAV's and bomb disposal robots be halted as a waste of money and instead use bomb squads and fighter/recon sorties because people are supposed to be dying?
In World War II, Japan learned a harsh lesson with regard to the preservation of the lives of its combatants. One major example, when the bulk of their carrier force was lost at Midway, so, too, was the bulk of their most experienced fighter pilots. That fact alone is likely to have cost them the war. Their disregard for pilot safety in aircraft design, in ship design (the carrier decks were thinly-armoured, the hangars were filled with explosives and fuel, and much of the people below deck at the time of their sinking were vaporized), and in philosophy, cost them the lives of their finest pilots and warriors. Would you ask of the people serving in the armed forces to place valour and honour before life like the Japanese did? To waste their training, their skill, their experience, for glory, in the name of "strengthening the ability to fight a war"?
Saving the lives of wounded soldiers is a must. It might be true that things like getting an arm or a leg blown off limits the quality of life you can expect after you recover, but it's also true that getting shot in the shoulder or the neck might not cause permanent damage, but might also cause heavy blood loss. Something like what's being talked about in the article would help save lives in these situations by reducing the soldier's heart rate and other vitals enough to prolong his or her ability to survive, particularly during an engagement where immediate medical attention might not be possible. So instead of having someone shot in the neck and bleeding out in a few minutes, you inject them with this and exponentially increase the window of opportunity to save their life. That's not being weak - That's being smart.
Besides, if war was only about killing as many of the enemy as possible, it'd come down to nuclear exchange as a first option. That sort of mindset is only applicable during a state of total war - When do you think was the last time that happened? And besides, even then, in order to kill more of the other guy, you need to make sure that less of your guys are killed, too.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
our efforts, to paraphrase patton, should be to make sure that as many as possible of the other guys die, and putting so much emphasis on saving all of our guys will impede that effort.
No matter how much killing one soldier can do, two can do more.
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They'll only reanimate the parts that watch TV, rent movies (repeatedly in a variety of formats, buy mobile phones (repeatedly in a variety of formats) and leave of the rest of the dissident free thinking ganglion parts dormant.
A zombie is a dead thing that moves. This article describes a living thing that doesn't move. How far off can it get?
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Am I the only one that get assosiations to a certain cat in a certain box, who's state is not alive nor dead? I say: Commence the cat testing!
On the contrary, I'm worried that this will just encourage a state of permanent war, with none of the current bad PR about our soldiers coming home in body bags...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Great so it will just be like Enemy Territory then? Medics running around poking people with syringes... Word to the wise medics, if ET has taught me anything, it's shoot the Medics first, so don't be so proud of this technological terror you have created. I find you lack of faith disturbing.
Interesting? Your guess stinks!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
It's true that war is not about preserving the lives of your own soldiers; there is a word for the context in which an army's first concern is preserving the lives of its own soldiers, and that word is "peacetime." In addition to this, though, the Pentagon needs to concentrate on sparing civilians; the US military has made no attempts to minimize "collateral damage" -- civilians killed in the process of fighting off attackers -- over the course of the Iraq War.
Of course, it would also help if they also ensured that the US doesn't begin future wars without plans to win them in the worst case -- as opposed to just hoping for the best.