For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

[Diche Bach]

1 minute ago, Green Baron said:

Hey, i am only helping with the "hard scifi" condition you wanted ;-)

No, you are not helping. Helping would be doing like you seem to think is the "gold standard" and finding me some links

[kerbiloid]

11 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Youtube does not count.

95% of what we are discussing here is somebody's youtube animations.

From lunar bases to BFShip.

P.S.
Sometimes with music.

Edited October 15, 2018 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

8 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Well, if we can have a regular scientific article about the hows and the probabilities, then i will revoke ;-)

Youtube does not count.

Arcor is a hopes&dreams company/foundation/whatever. The papers cited are, well "Rejuvenation Research" ... hmm, is that serious or made in-house ?

:-)

Im with you.

If I have to tell people not to get science from youtube one more time....then I will flood this place with every "scientific" "advance" I can find, and you can all enjoy sifting through BS for a good 6 months.

 

1 minute ago, Diche Bach said:

why don't you go find it? 

Ahh my dude, you have that backwards. If you are coming in with the claim, you need to be the one coming in with the references.

 

2 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

"Youtube does not count?" Seriously? What does that even mean? 

It means that the internet is rife with charlatans intent on spouting complete gibberish when they arent actively trying to decieve. They outnumber everyone else. Trust it at your peril.

 

Yes, peer reviewed journals, whilst not all as reputable as one anoter, ARE automatically better than youtube.

 

[Green Baron]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

95% of what we are discussing here is somebody's youtube animations.

From lunar bases to BFShip.

Absolutely true. But hard scifi was called out ...

[Diche Bach]

You guys are just being argumentative cheeks wipes. Wanna help? Give me links. Additional arguments to the effect you have already made will result in me just plain blocking both your accounts, because I simply don't have time to argue with twits on ANY website at any time.

 

 

[Green Baron]

9 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

No, you are not helping. Helping would be doing like you seem to think is the "gold standard" and finding me some links

I tried (before, not in the last months), but there are none.

I am not claiming anything. I am just saying that currently there is no possibility to freeze and revive a human body. And there is nothing i see on the horizon to do so. Single cells or microtome slices, yes. Even an organ for a few hours. But apart from that ...

Hey, we don't need to make a quarrel out of that. If you are willing to accept it in your scifi story then why not. I'm only saying freezing won't work in a hard scifi environment. Well, it'll work to pimp up the underway cuisine ... :-)

"Formal dress is optional" ;-)

Edited October 15, 2018 by Green Baron

[tater]

I have to admit I missed the initial post regarding cryonics, so I missed the context. If the goal is for a harder SF story, instead of fully freezing, perhaps something akin to a medically induced coma could reduce the required supplies aboard ship. The subject ages, etc, but they use fewer resources, require less habitable volume, and so forth. I'm unsure what the science is on that, as well, but it might be more plausible than corpsicles.

Edited October 15, 2018 by tater

[Green Baron]

Maybe invent a process for your story, like someone has found a way to avoid cell damage and keep the brain connections intact for the period you envision (800yrs) e.g. by exchanging the body liquids for something that doesn't change volume depending on heat, as well as can serve as a surrogate for the original body liquids.

And/or store brain apart from the body and re-pot it later ... ?

But this isn't hard scifi any more, rather (cheap) horror genre ?

Edit: scrub it. Take @tater's suggestion if it works for the timeline ;-)

Edited October 15, 2018 by Green Baron

[tater]

@Diche Bach

Wow, 800 years.

I don't think a coma will work for that.

So what to do?

One idea might be to look up people working on increasing human lifespan, and see what reasonable people in that area think might be possible in that regime. I imagine some effort to mitigate the clock that starts breaking us after XX cell replications might be a start. Say they could get a nominal human life to be closer to 200 years, then somehow slowing it via a coma-like state might get you into the ballpark, though it's sorta leaving really "hard" SF behind. If that's the only science to sorta break, that still puts it far harder than most SF, though.

Still, the longer it is reasonable to extend human lifespans, the fewer human lifespans 800 years is.

 

[Diche Bach]

Just now, Green Baron said:

I tried (before, not in the last months), but there are none.

I am not claiming anything. I am just saying that currently there is no possibility to freeze and revive a human body. And there is nothing i see on the horizon to do so. Single cells or microtome slices, yes. Even an organ for a few hours. But apart from that ...

Hey, we don't need to make a quarrel out of that. If you are willing to accept it in your scifi story then why not. I'm only saying freezing won't work in a hard scifi environment. Well, it'll work to pimp up the underway cuisine ... :-)

My past forays have apparently resulted in different results than yours . . . Like I said, not currently a client of a Universities search function and I'm not in any hurry to contact the alma mater to set it up. So my capacity to bury you in a deluge of citations as you seem to feel would be "compelling" is limited.

You are PERFECTLY correct to state that "currently there is no possibility to freeze and revive a human body" but then I don't believe anyone in this thread has claimed as much.

If I adopt the same pedantic stance you seem intent on maintaining, then I could easily point out to you that "currently it is not possible to propel a space craft at any speed faster than about 70km/s" or to point out that "currently nuclear pulse propulsion is not possible." Nor is laser sail technology of the sort which can achieve 0.3 c, nor are the nano-techs necessary to send a starshot probe.

Indeed, until the thing is actually OUT THERE, functioning, it is necessary to point out that "currently it is not possible to build and launch a functioning cryogenic infrared telescope positioned at the L_0 position where it can benefit from being eclipsed by the Earth . . ." even though that is EXACTLY what thousands of scientists and technicians working on the James Webb Space Telescope have spent billions of dollar and many years striving to achieve.

All this to say: until it is achieved it is science fiction, and at one point myriad technologies which are now common everyday technologies WERE science fiction.

There is however, a big difference between technologies which DEFY established empirical generalizations or well-ordained theories (so-called "Natural Laws") and those which depend on possibilities which have yet to be firmly proven or disproven, much less those which simply rely on exploration of dynamics which have yet to be explored.

We might rank order these as: (1) Probably impossible given current science; (2) Possibly impossible given current science; (3) Possibly possible given current science. We could also add one more layer to that cake (4) Probably possible given current science.

Neither you, nor I have the actual expertise to say with great authority, of that much I can be confident. You are an archaeologist, and I am a retired evolutionary psychologist. However, in my opinion, based on what I know about current research into topics of hypothermia, organ preservation and therapeutic hypothermia for amelioration of post-resuscitation syndromes, cryo-stasis sufficient to reduce required organic resource consumption by pasengers and to moreover, reduce the psychological burden of prolonged space flight would lie in layer (3) Possibly possible given current science.s

There, you now have some keywords to plug in to your Galileo account or whichever search engine you have at hand!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30315552

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30309417

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26433095

 

[kerbiloid]

8 minutes ago, tater said:

800 years

800 years later they will forget what the snack they were needed at the destination star.

[Green Baron]

5 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30315552

"Mild hypothermia with temperature reduction of several degrees Celsius is as effective as modest or deep hypothermia in providing therapeutic benefit without introducing collateral/systemic complications"

This is about therapeutic cooling, not freezing, if i read it right. We have discussed similar things here in the past, iirc. ?

5 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30309417

"in mild hypothermia group, the hypothermia was reduced to the hypothermia range (33.0±1.0) centigrade "

As well, cooling. And the cooled pigs had changes to their brain.

5 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26433095

 

Same, it is about regional therapeutic cooling a few degrees below normal.

"The available clinical data suggest that regional and systemic hypothermia is a relatively safe and feasible initial treatment modality for patients with acute SCI(*) ..."

SCI: Spinal Cord Injury.

*shrug*

D.d.d.d.ere is.s.s.s nod.d.d.d.ding ab.b.b.b.bout f.f.f.f.reezing, if i am not mistaken ...

[Diche Bach]

8 minutes ago, tater said:

@Diche Bach

Wow, 800 years.

I don't think a coma will work for that.

So what to do?

One idea might be to look up people working on increasing human lifespan, and see what reasonable people in that area think might be possible in that regime. I imagine some effort to mitigate the clock that starts breaking us after XX cell replications might be a start. Say they could get a nominal human life to be closer to 200 years, then somehow slowing it via a coma-like state might get you into the ballpark, though it's sorta leaving really "hard" SF behind. If that's the only science to sorta break, that still puts it far harder than most SF, though.

Still, the longer it is reasonable to extend human lifespans, the fewer human lifespans 800 years is.

 

Yes, 800 years is a long time isn't it! 

But there are other known exoplanets that are not so far away too . . . some of which may stay in the "possibly possible to be 'habitable'" echelon long enough for me to get my thing packaged and selling units and still claim "I'm a HARD Sci Fi Creator!" even though they will probably, eventually be found to be highly unlikely to be 'habitable.'

I'd say 200 years is doable, and off the top of my head, that puts a dozen or more possibly possible habitable exoplanets on the drawing board I think?

It isn't actually necessary to FREEZE a human being into a chunk of ice for the benefits of "cryo-stasis" to be partially realized. True, Humanscicles would be the ideal and if that degree of cryogenic stasis could ever be achieved then we really WILL prove to be the "Precursors" because nothing will stop us from eventually sending colony ships everywhere . . . But simply slowing metabolism and inducing a torpor state (medically induced coma as you put it) should be able to work wonders for making long-distance manned spaceflight tenable.

In the first place, a person who is unconscious will not be psychologically burdened by a 200 year long journey. Assuming that the effects on cell senescence and organ senescence are also reduced, "aging" should also be markedly reduced by prolonged maintenance in a low-metabolism state. I have to admit, this is probably the "most speculative" part of the whole spaghetti bowl, but I do believe there is at least anecdotal evidence suggesting that aging is slowed by such conditions.

Perhaps most importantly: rate of consumption of organic resources (food, water, air) would obviously be dramatically reduced. While the actual rate of reduction might not be sufficient to allow the departure of the craft with the full store of all necessary resources for the entire journey, the rate of reduction might well be sufficient for a high-efficiency arcological system to achieve a positive resource balance for the necessary duration of the journey. In sum: if there small-scale onboard "ecosystems" and the human and animal wastes are all channeled back into these systems, then the total quantity of organics at launch could be a significantly reduced fraction of the total that would be consumed during the journey.

[Spaceception]

29 minutes ago, tater said:

@Diche Bach

Wow, 800 years.

I don't think a coma will work for that.

So what to do?

One idea might be to look up people working on increasing human lifespan, and see what reasonable people in that area think might be possible in that regime. I imagine some effort to mitigate the clock that starts breaking us after XX cell replications might be a start. Say they could get a nominal human life to be closer to 200 years, then somehow slowing it via a coma-like state might get you into the ballpark, though it's sorta leaving really "hard" SF behind. If that's the only science to sorta break, that still puts it far harder than most SF, though.

Still, the longer it is reasonable to extend human lifespans, the fewer human lifespans 800 years is.

 

An 800-year journey would definitely need you to think about the wait calculation. I'd say we're less than a century away from fusion now. And if we don't get it by then, there must be something ridiculous in the way preventing us from getting it.

 

But since we could have fusion this century, that could be the one thing @Diche Bach makes an exception for, sci-fi wise. It can still be hard sci-fi if you have fusion. You just need to stick within what we know about fusion so far, and use a reactor design we have today. Given the fact it would take decades (at the least) to build a large, crewed starship (And that's only if you have much cheaper spaceflight, and some sort of space economy), fusion energy would likely crop up in the middle of construction anyway, so you may as well plan for it.
They could be constructing an Orion-esque ship, and you could detail it; but about halfway through construction, fusion energy is cracked, and they halt construction for about a decade to build a fusion drive/reactor to cut the travel time in half (or more).

Or you could go for a fission powered ship regardless, and have the story be around them trudging along interstellar space to look forward to a nice colony on the other end.

Okay, so 200 years or less. The wait calculation is still relevant. That gives us about 8 known planets to work from (3 if you only count ones with <1.5 Earth radii), 2 of them would take a couple hundred years or more at 0.05 c. So you could imagine the engineers in your story building a faster ship in that time that can wave past the first one.

Edited October 15, 2018 by Spaceception

[Green Baron]

5 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

It isn't actually necessary to FREEZE a human being into a chunk of ice for the benefits of "cryo-stasis" to be partially realized. True, Humanscicles would be the ideal and if that degree of cryogenic stasis could ever be achieved then we really WILL prove to be the "Precursors" because nothing will stop us from eventually sending colony ships everywhere . . . But simply slowing metabolism and inducing a torpor state (medically induced coma as you put it) should be able to work wonders for making long-distance manned spaceflight tenable.

 

Yeah, i read the 200 - 250 years as well as a theoretical limit.

Cooling: well you either stay in the safe area of let's say 33°C, but people will age, or you go lower to lets say 20°C and risk damage. Anyway, aging is not stopped. They'll waste away anyway.

Edited October 15, 2018 by Green Baron

[Diche Bach]

51 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

"Mild hypothermia with temperature reduction of several degrees Celsius is as effective as modest or deep hypothermia in providing therapeutic benefit without introducing collateral/systemic complications"

This is about therapeutic cooling, not freezing, if i read it right. We have discussed similar things here in the past, iirc. ?

"in mild hypothermia group, the hypothermia was reduced to the hypothermia range (33.0±1.0) centigrade "

As well, cooling. And the cooled pigs had changes to their brain.

Same, it is about regional therapeutic cooling a few degrees below normal.

"The available clinical data suggest that regional and systemic hypothermia is a relatively safe and feasible initial treatment modality for patients with acute SCI(*) ..."

SCI: Spinal Cord Injury.

*shrug*

D.d.d.d.ere is.s.s.s nod.d.d.d.ding ab.b.b.b.bout f.f.f.f.reezing, if i am not mistaken ...

Yes, like I said: you are being too dismissive, and also too pedantic. You seem to be suggesting that: because it is not possible to freeze a human solid and leave them that way for 10 years then thaw them out and have them return to fully normal functioning  RIGHT NOW, that it will never be possible for ANY sort of cryo/chemo/energetic stasis to have functional benefit for long-term space flight.

You should try to understand things before you dismiss them under the guise of "being helpful" 

ADDIT: it is also perhaps prudent to remind you that: what scientists are attempting to achieve in these respects are not to achieve things which defy nature, but rather to REPLICATE or create analogs of processes which already EXIST in nature.

The fact that frogs can sink into the mud below a lake and experience very low body temperatures, including freezing of certain portions of their bodies, then when spring comes "wake up" and go back to being living, fully functioning frogs, certainly doesn't prove that it will ever be possible for human beings to experience the analogous process. But it does demonstrate that the principles involved do not defy reality as you seem to think.

In sum: putting people into a state of torpor (including but not limited to reduced body temperature) is, as far as I know already a thing for certain traumatic injury interventions, and is likely to be even more of a thing as time goes on.

Edited October 15, 2018 by Diche Bach

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

They could be constructing an Orion-esque ship, and you could detail

Dyson's Project Orion has a nice but brief description at the very end of 17.Coca-Cola chapter.

Edited October 15, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

8 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

Yes, like I said: you are being too dismissive, and also too pedantic. You seem to be suggesting that: because it is not possible to freeze a human solid and leave them that way for 10 years then thaw them out and have them return to fully normal functioning  RIGHT NOW, that it will never be possible for ANY sort of cryo/chemo/energetic stasis to have functional benefit for long-term space flight.

You should try to understand things before you dismiss them under the guise of "being helpful" 

Man, what do you want from me ? Where did i say that ? I said: freezing and thawing a human body alive is not hard scifi and i stand to that.

And i said that, apart from hopes&dreams, there is no serious work on freezing a human.

You presented me papers on therapeutic cooling (5-7 degrees below normal) that i quickly browsed over and had to dismiss because they do not bring us forward here, not because i want to make you angry (i do not if that is your impression).

But let us see, maybe we find a solution ...

Edited October 15, 2018 by Green Baron

[Spaceception]

Just now, kerbiloid said:

Dyson's Project Orion has a nice but brief description at the very end of 17.Coca-Cola chapter.

Like the soda company? I read somewhere they were asked by General Atomic at some point for a bomb delivery system for the ship. Do you have a link to it?

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Dyson's Project Orion has a nice but brief description at the very end of 17.Coca-Cola chapter.

I don't know the book, but I found this https://www.patrickstomlinson.com/2013/10/08/coca-cola-and-nuclear-bombs/

Coke Engineer (being held in a basement in Area 51): “So, you want us to build a vending machine that can throw out several thousand, 300lb, 6 inch diameter ‘Soda cans’ once a second?”
Air Force General: “Yes, my airmen are very thirsty.”
CE: “You’re building a nuclear bomb machine gun, aren’t you?”
AFG: “No!”
CE: “AREN’T YOU?”
AFG: “…yes.”

[Diche Bach]

10 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Man, what do you want from me ? Where did i say that ? I said: freezing and thawing a human body alive is not hard scifi and i stand to that.

And i said that, apart from hopes&dreams, there is no serious work on freezing a human.

You presented me papers on therapeutic cooling (5-7 degrees below normal) that i quickly browsed over and had to dismiss because they do not bring us forward here, not because i want to make you angry.

But let us see, maybe we find a solution ...

And I said "Yeah, 'freezing and thawing a human body alive is not hard scifi'. So what?"

Like I said, try to understand

There are now several posts since your first one including some by me where I provide more detail. I'll leave it at that, except to repeat what I already said several posts back.

Quote

You are PERFECTLY correct to state that "currently there is no possibility to freeze and revive a human body" but then I don't believe anyone in this thread has claimed as much.

Not necessary to achieve functional benefits of cryo-stasis (which in truth should be called "Cryo-Chemo Stasis" because most legit models involve perfusion of specific drugs if not artificial blood into the organism to mediate non-destructive effects of the cooling).

https://www.nursing.virginia.edu/news/alumnus-mark-adams/

Edited October 15, 2018 by Diche Bach

[Green Baron]

12 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

And I said "Yeah, 'freezing and thawing a human body alive is not hard scifi'. So what?"

Like I said, try to understand

Ok, if you give up the hard scifi then go for it. It is the only reason i came up with it.

Therapeutic cooling has nothing to do with prolonging life or slowing metabolism. though the latter is an intended effect. It is, if i understand it right and i tried briefly, to avoid further damage and secondary effects for hours (not centuries) for accident victims for example. It is not a technique to prolong lives, which it doesn't, in contrary, it is principally a life threatening condition.

 

But, no problem, if you do fusion driven spaceships with very high ISPs, get all out of a human lifespan, and do some chemistry to slow aging, then who am i to critize or scorn :-)

Edited October 15, 2018 by Green Baron

[tater]

The brain is still the principal concern. Even with coma states, there could be serious degradation, I'm unsure exactly how nonvolatile memory states actually are, and how they might be affected by literally hundreds of years of unconstrained (and unconnected to daily reality, and indeed other human beings) dreaming.

Heck, that might be a story right there. They make it, but they have been unalterably changed by the experience of living in a literal dream world for hundreds of years.

I'd wager that if the brain were well enough understood to even know the answer to the question, we might already have AI, or the ability to download consciousness to a computer  (the only way to test would to be to do it to some people for hundreds of years, which pushes the timeline out to at least 2X that mission experiment test time).

So an alternate method might be to send human genetic material along, frozen (embryos), and robots containing human consciousness. The cyborgs explore, and if there is a place worth staying, they grow the real humans (you have to assume that growing a person in a jar is a thing).

So you have replicated a brain in a machine format such that you can DL human experience (a leap, but one people actually seriously talk about in timeframes from decades to hundreds of years) as one tech. Robotics as another (and computers small enough to hold human consciousness fitting within), and growing mammals outside a mother as yet another. Those 3 techs might actually be easier to suspend disbelief on than cryo.

 

BTW, don't miss watching that video I posted up the thread. It's pretty inspiring.

Edited October 15, 2018 by tater

[Green Baron]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

 

Heck, that might be a story right there. They make it, but they have been unalterably changed by the experience of living in a literal dream world for hundreds of years.

Cool, but i doubt that slowly turning in ones own thoughts leads to new insights. Unconscious people don't think, or do they ?

3 minutes ago, tater said:

So an alternate method might be to send human genetic material along, frozen (embryos), and robots containing human consciousness. The cyborgs explore, and if there is a place worth staying, they grow the real humans (you have to assume that growing a person in a jar is a thing).

Would they want to go "back" ? A drop of 5W15 in the morning instead of shower and teeth brush and breakfast ... but then again, in order not to chase off the aliens they visit a biological appearance might be wiser ...

3 minutes ago, tater said:

So you have replicated a brain in a machine format such that you can DL human experience (a leap, but one people actually seriously talk about in timeframes from decades to hundreds of years) as one tech. Robotics as another (and computers small enough to hold human consciousness fitting within), and growing mammals outside a mother as yet another. Those 3 techs might actually be easier to suspend disbelief on than cryo.

Yep. You could probably sell the plot line to Elon ... ;-)

[Diche Bach]

4 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Ok, if you give up the hard scifi then go for it.

Therapeutic cooling has nothing to do with prolonging life or slowing metabolism. though the latter is an intended effect. It is, if i understand it right and i tried briefly, to avoid further damage and secondary effects for hours (not centuries) for accident victims for example. It is not a technique to prolong lives, which it doesn't, in contrary, it is principally a life threatening condition.

But, no problem, if you do fusion driven spaceships with very high ISPs, get all out of a human lifespan, and do some chemistry to slow aging, then who am i to critize or scorn :-)

You are aware of what happens to frogs, bats, etc. when they hibernate? Your level of knowledge of biology is sufficient for you to conclude that those processes cannot be modeled for application in humans?

LOL, slowing aging is no problemo! The fact that you obviously have zero knowledge of this well-established empirical generalization (which has existed for decades) and yet seem to feel that you are sufficiently well-informed to dismiss science fiction which would leverage these sorts of natural phenomena is what I find remarkable.

Like I said: I always thought you were a pretty cool, pretty knowledgeable and likeable person, but for some reason you are feeling particularly pedantic, argumentative and dismissive today 

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

17 minutes ago, tater said:

how they might be affected by literally hundreds of years of unconstrained (and unconnected to daily reality, and indeed other human beings) dreaming.

Just a lot of wisdom and several new habits.