Is Human Hibernation Possible? Going to Sleep for Long Duration Spaceflight

Universe Today ^ | 06/21/2017 | Fraser Cain

[bk1000]

I always wanted one of those chairs, but they were $2000 and I couldnt afford it. Now I can afford it, but they are $4000. Can’t win. Just have to use the one at the mall. Probably just as well. If I had one I might never leave the house!

[FatherofFive]

If we are serious about exploring other planets, we need to start launching payloads of retrievable food, water and oxygen into space right now and build a supply line.

The distances are so staggeringly large. And the faster you go, you have to deal with the dilation of time.

Anyone going on a trip to another star will never see earth again, as they know it.

[xp38]

Or it decides to do a detour.

[LibWhacker]

human passengers are going to be using up precious air, water and food

Rather than spending all this time and effort trying to figure out how to induce some kind of creepy, unnatural, torpor-filled state in your crew, how about spending an equal amount of time and effort figuring out how to carry more "precious" air, water and food with you (Hint, hint: Project Orion)? It's only precious because you're not doing that; air, water and food are rather cheap here on Earth. There is no reason they can't be relatively cheap in space too.

As far as I'm concerned torpor, natural or unnatural, isn't something you want in a crew member. If a guy is too dumb to have any curiosity about the natural world, leave him behind. I mean, you can get the entire Library of Congress on a computer chip the size of your thumbnail. That's more than enough material to take anyone from zero to PhD in any subject he chooses. All during a round trip to Pluto! If a guy is disruptive, then bid him night, night. But leave the others alone. I'm sure they'll be able to figure out productive things to do. Life is too short to spend any significant portion of it in a stupor.

[Axenolith]

Legacy of Herot?

[BlueLancer]

I always wanted one of those chairs, but they were $2000 and I couldn't afford it. Now I can afford it, but they are $4000. Can’t win. Just have to use the one at the mall. Probably just as well. If I had one I might never leave the house!

George Carlin extract:
Everyone is eating nicely, and you look down and you realize that the dog is licking his balls! No one says anything. No one mentions the spectacular thing going on. Hey, if I could reach, I'd never leave the house!

[N. Theknow]

Solution: Only send teenagers and launch on Saturday mornings with the admonition that the first one up has to do the dishes. They’ll sleep the entire trip.

[Pecos]

Bingo!

[Dr. Sivana]

What could go wrong?

Besides "passengers", there is the Robinson Family in Lost In Space, disrupted from their sleep en route to Alpha Centauri.

There is also Forever Young, where the one guy who knew about Mel Gibson died and he woke up 50 years late. (I worked at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, CT as a contractor. I could imagine such an experiment being overlooked for 50 years in the bowels of the "M" building.

Oh, and let us not forget "Idiocracy". Like Gibson, the parties stay in place, but for all practical purposes wake up in another world.

[lavaroise]

Just freeze the thyroid

[jmcenanly]

Actually, it worked out fairly well for him, preserving him well past the time it would have taken him to get to his intended destination. How he treated his rescuers was his problem.

[xone]

You could sleep for two hundred years, travel at fifty thousand miles per hour and still not get close to the nearest star.

You be in the sun in less than 90 days. The nearest star.

[knarf]

I just discovered the thing and I am hooked.

I can snag the floor model for 3K ... still out of range, but I messaged my MD and asked if there was any medical mojo in him to swing this as a therapeutic tool.

Still waiting ....