Gunshot Victims To Be Part of "Suspended Animation" Trials 357
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."
Re:Old idea. What makes it possible now? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Old idea. What makes it possible now? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Victims" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Space travel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Space travel (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds more like science fiction than anything else to me.
I'm sure they said the same thing about organ transplants a hundred years ago.
Re:Pretty simple in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's a bit trickier to replace every milliliter of blood in your body with cold salty water than to lower someone's body temperature.
Sounds like a horror film plot (Score:4, Insightful)
I seem to recall some horror film plots something like that. Usually it's something along the lines of zombies, but I also seem to recall something along the lines of preserving the lives of those who are supposed to be dead and something bad happening as a result. Combine the two? Uh boy... they are supposed to be dead and when "brought back" are actually spirited by demons or something like that.
I am extremely wary yet curious about the technique. To take a body and remove the blood and store it? I'm okay with doing that to a person officially declared dead especially if it's (1) approved by the living person in advance (2) someone extremely recently dead.
What is it about blood which causes problems which are solved by removing it? What's more, with all that capilary action, how can they be sure they removed it all?
Re:Space travel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Space travel (Score:5, Insightful)
Or a hundred-man colonization team, for that matter.
That would not be a successful long term colonization effort. But fifty men plus fifty women might be.
Re:Space travel (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you don't think that maintenance people know how to screw?
Or for that matter, if you're carrying a million people, you can wake 100 of them every year for maintenance duties, and then each of them will have spent three years awake for the voyage.
Note that this assumes that 30K years is correct. At 0.1% of lightspeed, the trip would be closer to 4300 years than 30,000.
Yes, we don't know how to get to 300 km/s now. We will before we consider going to alphacent. And if we decide to go to alphacent before we can do 300 km/s, well, we'll have 25000 years to figure out how to go 300 km/s and still get to alphacent first with a ship that's going 300 km/s.
Re:Space travel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Space travel (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends upon your definition of "qualified"
There would be millions of volunteers. If you need a thousand, you could pick the top 0.1%. I would definitely want to go. If you look at history, there has never been a problem getting people to volunteer for dangerous, one-way missions. In the 1500's, there was no shortage of colonists heading out of Europe. The Polynesians colonized every speck of land in he Pacific. The Japanese Kamikaze attacks stopped because they ran out of planes, not pilots. In the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, of the dozens of astronaut candidates, ONE dropped out.
You have a very dim view of humanity if you think there would be a problem staffing a starship.
SAW XII: They Can Torture You Forever (Score:4, Insightful)
In which the victim's are cut and hacked until almost dead ... then suspended ... repaired ... and the fun begins again.
Combine this with the seriously chilling 'time dilation' drug [slashdot.org] and the future just seems a little darker.
Re:Space travel (Score:2, Insightful)
"Why wouldn't sleeper ships have radio beacons, and if later ships developed better propulsion tech, they could catch up to the older ones, update their engines or transfer their crew. Why would you simply leave the older ships out there, knowing they're eventually going to catch up with you at the destination?"
We can't even find a Boing on Earth who had radio beacons.