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Stasis, long distance travel

Hibernation and Space Travel: Science Fiction or Science Reality?

Science Fiction is awash with space travel, not surprisingly, and not a fair few involve a form of hibernation, stasis, etc, in their form of long distance travel. And, as with much of science fiction, it is there because it has a certain place in reality as well. 

So it’s no surprise that with possible Mars missions in the future, scientists are looking at the safest, cheapest, and smartest way to get astronauts safely to their destination and back again.

“Wouldn’t it be neat if you could just put them out?” said Warren Zapol, the head of anesthesiology at Harvard University’s Massachusetts General Hospital.

Multiple options exist in the world of theoretical. Suggestions such as reducing the crew cabin temperature. But because body temperatures below 30 Celsius present difficulties to the heart’s rhythm, it doesn’t go down as the most favorable option.

Another option, that Zapol and colleagues have looked at, is just as undesirable, but still somewhat safer. Reporting in this month’s Anesthesiology journal, the group suggest that hydrogen sulfide – that wonderful stuff produced by swamp gas and rotten eggs – could be the answer to long distance space travel.

Apparently when exposed to hydrogen sulfide, a mouse’s metabolism will slow, without cutting blood flow to the brain. “The mice aren’t asleep,” Zapol told Discovery News. “If you pinch their tails, they respond.  I don’t know what it’s like,” he added, “probably some slow-motion world.”

Now for the moment, such processes for long distance space travel and hibernation are many years away. However, these advances in knowledge could provide help to those who have suffered traumatic and life threatening injury.

“Sixty percent of people in war are dead right there on the field,” Zapol said. “They are instantly hurt, and because there is no blood and no fluids in the field, by the time they get to a hospital they are cold and dead and there is nothing to fix. During this early period after trauma, if we could freeze you down or shut you down, we could restart you after we fix the aorta, or whatever has been damaged.”

If you’ve watched any sort of medical drama then you would have witnessed at least one attempt to cool a person’s body down to keep them alive just that little bit longer. MASH did it, House has done it, and I imagine ER and Chicago Hope all did it as well! But for emergency workers and battlefield medics, this is pretty much an impractical solution.

“Corpsmen aren’t walking around with 150 pounds of cold water,” Zapol said. “But what if you could just fog them with hydrogen sulfide?”

Metabolic measurements taken of the mice during Zapol’s experiments, measuring their consumption of oxygen and their production of carbon dioxide, saw a drop as early as 10 minutes after the mice began inhaling the hydrogen sulfide. They continued to remain low as the gas was administered, and returned to normal within 30 minutes once the gas was removed.

These experiments will continue, probably extending to larger mammals like sheep, so that a level of confidence can be achieved. “Before you use it on astronauts, you want to make sure it’s very, very safe,” he said.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/04/04/space-hibernation.html