I had a thought about hypersleep.

You know that trope they use in a lot of movies and TV shows where people are in tubes, or boxes and stay that way for decades or centuries, and yet wake up fresh as a daisy.

After watching several movies with the same, or similar idea it just dawned on me that that possibly the only way this would work is that they deliberately kill you when the ship is launched and the machines keep your body preserved in some fashion till you reach your destination where you are somehow revived and brought back to life.

Of course that would not explain stories where your body is kept alive with beating heart and such, but I just think that if it were possible to do that this is the only likely way they would do it.

Can we discuss this idea more?

 

"Hypersleep" -- not sure where that term comes from -- is usually supposed to be cryogenic suspension, freezing the body to suspend life functions, or at the very least, a form of high-tech hibernation that slows them to a crawl. There's some discussion of it here:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/lifesupport.php#freeze

 

An induced coma would not prevent cellular activity and aging. A 200 year journey would end in a lot of tubes filled with something very awful.

 

That's quite true. Or something grizzled and withered.

I was just thinking that if there was a way to preserve the tissues of the body with no need for life support at the point of suspension they could then reverse that process or revive them at the destination and there would be at best minimal damage or none at all. Freezing would cause cells to rupture due to water formation, so why cryonics as we know it now won't work. Freezing the body in nitrogen or such wouldn't that cause more damage due to freezing?

Anyway it was just a thought on the topic.

 

Yeah the thing that always bothered me about long term cryonics is that however much you slow the metabolism, it's not halted so a person should still age as cells die and are replaced.

The only way around that would be some magical quantum physics bending stasis field, which is I think how Star Trek sometimes does it and pretty much what the nullentropy containers in the later Dune books seem to do (and Red Dwarf, now that I think about it.) In which case inducing a coma would be more the the sake of the person's sanity than anything.

Being stuck in a tube for a few centuries with every cell in your body being suspended in time (relative to the outside of the tube), not breathing, unable to move or even close your eyes is bound to drive anyone insane in the first few months alone. That's even assuming a conscious mind can operate in that state.

 

It could occur earlier, but "hypersleep" is a term in the 1976 screenplay for Alien by Dan O'Bannon, that survives into the June, 1978 revised final version by Walter Hill and David Giler based on O'Bannon's.

 

I think O'Bannon came up with the name too.

 

NASA is looking into something similar:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/advancing-torpor-inducing-transfer-habitats-for-human-stasis-to-mars

Hibernation may be a better way to describe things.

Vitrification using fluids besides water ice that can act as ice-knives--for true long term storage.

Ironically--you want to eliminate oxygen if you can. Flooding the body with it only upon revival.

It may be that a frozen person is all but vivisected to allow each organ its own needs.

There is a book called Suspended Animation by Robert Prehoda
https://www.amazon.com/Suspended-Animation-the-Research-Possibility/dp/B000SMANXE

The science is a bit dated--but worth a look.

Certain surfactants, artificial blood liquid breathing advances may also be of use for g-forces--so look for something more like The Abyss.

 

The US Navy did try liquid breathing, the bit with the rat in The Abyss was the actual stuff that divers had breathed, but trials didn't prove that beneficial. Don't know where they are with this or if its been dropped.

 

At best, I thought that any kind of suspended animation would slow down aging, but not eliminate it entirely. And I often dismissed any references of people being in "the freezer" as a colloquialism to a near-frozen environment they may wake up in or just how cold they feel when they wake up due to initially poor circulation.

 

I don't know, till we get the technology it's up to writers to make good speculation but I like my idea of the bodies being in perpetual preservation but clinically dead till they are revived, hence why you can't go back into the pod and sleep again, it's a one way process to be put under. I thought that was what they were hinting at in Passengers.

 

I don't follow the logic there. If they can be revived, then by definition, it's not a one-way process. I haven't seen the movie -- and have no intention to -- but I gather the pods were simply designed to be single-use because the designers assumed they were foolproof and nothing could go wrong (which is a foolish assumption to make).

The plot of Passengers has been likened by many to the 1953 Weird Science comics anthology's story "50 Girls 50" by Al Williamson, which can be read here. In that very dark story, it was established that the human body could only survive the freezing and thawing process once -- presumably it was too strenuous to be repeated.

 

I have seen the movie and the process to put people in the pods was one way, it couldn't be reproduced on the ship itself.

 

That is not what "one-way" means, though. If you can be frozen and then unfrozen, if it's reversible, then that is a two-way process by definition. But if you can't be refrozen again, then it's a one-time process.

Although it sounds like you're saying it could be repeated with the right equipment, but they just didn't have the right equipment onboard -- which seems like monumentally stupid design. If the ship could handle carrying the mass of a swimming pool and a bar and a bunch of fancy chandeliers and so forth, surely some of that mass allowance could've been used for cryogenics equipment just in case. Cars have spare tires. Skydivers have backup chutes. And a starship reliant on cryogenics should absolutely carry the means to refreeze accidentally revived personnel, if it's at all possible for such a thing to be done.

 

That's basically it. I like the movie but it's got some amazing stupid in it like that. The sleep process couldn't be replicated on the ship because they were all put to sleep when they left Earth, and the company that built the ship kept that tech off the ship. That's what I meant by one way, as it couldn't be reproduced.

 

As I said, what you mean there is "one-time." "One-way" means it can't be reversed -- like a one-way street. One-way cryogenics would be just freezing someone to death.

 

What you want is to have a combination of frozen and unfrozen crew rotating out in shifts--so there is always somebody about to do work.

 

True but in the case of my example Passengers once out they can't go back in. The sleep process, could not be replicated on the ship.

 

A true stasis field would by definition cease time inside the field. Only when the field is collapsed would time resume. Therefore, anyone inside the field would have no awareness of the passage of time, even to the point of needing proof that time has indeed passed to believe they were even in stasis to begin with.

 

Yeah, but I think we're all agreed that's a really stupid idea and nobody would actually do it that way.