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Gunshot Victims To Be Part of "Suspended Animation" Trials
New submitter Budgreen writes: "Knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month. The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. 'If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,' says surgeon Peter Rheeat from the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique. 10 gunshot and stabbing victims will take part in the trials."
Sometimes its small details that make a huge difference and allow old ideas to become reality.
Just think about blood tranfusions. The first attemps to store blood to transfuse it at a later point all failed. A simple stabilisation agent made the procedure possible. I wouldn't expect the New Scientist to produce such details in their publications though.
It would be interesting to see a paper from a medical journal on this topic.
This idea is very old, so I suppose there was a technical hurdle to overcome.
Probably the replacing-all-their-blood-with-saline-without-them-dying part.
No sig today...
It is very unlikely that we will ever be able to use this technology for deep space travel. First, the distance that grate that you need thousands of years to get there. Therefore, the suspended animation must last that long without chemical decay of cellular structure. Second, all the technology in the ship must last that long. We have no technology which is usable without maintenance for that long. Therefore, self-repair ability for everything including the ship itself must be part of the mission. This looks very much, like the man who wanted to travel around the world in a straight line from Peter Bichsel. Third, all that requires energy, which has to be brought with you.
In the end it will also not matter, because when these people reach the distant location, there will be no compatible civilization on earth left. If any at all. 10000 years ago we were sitting in caves. Reading books from medieval time in their original writing is almost impossible to most people today and that is only 500-1000 years. There is no point in deep space travel as long as we are not able to go faster than light or at least close to light speed.
People don't generally think of multi-millennium cryo-sleeper journeys as a "there and back" deal, so the state of any civilization on Earth would be pretty much moot once they wake up at the destination.
That is, unless Earth has advanced so much that FTL Earth ships arrived at the destination before the sleepers did. In which case; "welcome to the world of tomorrow!"
Perhaps no point for those staying behind, no. But for the pioneers, however long the journey takes, they may well become the first humans to explore and colonise a new planet and star system. If you honestly think that such an amazing achievement is entirely pointless, then I think you might be on the wrong website.