11 ms·

NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction

142 points by evo_9 8y ago

Rjevski 8y ago
> the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. At least they will probably have wifi. If only. TCP at those latencies will be completely unusable. Even if you manage to “trick” TCP with a middlebox that fakes ACKs you’d still be waiting minutes just for an HTTPS connection to establish.
- pc86 8y ago
  The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. Seriously though, they'll need to have some sort of non-work, non-research activities to last the months it will take to get anywhere. You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times.
  - overcast 8y ago
    Stock up on movies, and books? I mean that's pretty much the daily life of most people on this planet right now. Go to work, come home, engage in entertainment / sex. Beyond that, they can't really expect to be able to go outside and walk in the park. I think everyone is overestimating how much free time these guys will have. It's not the equivalent of sitting in a prison cell without mission responsibilities(experiments, chores, food).
    - monkeynotes 8y ago
      Exercise, books, chess, learn a language, I can think of plenty of stuff to do. People in prison sometimes enjoy the opportunity they have to focus on self improvement without the stress of having to make money for food/shelter. Surely being on a craft in deep space is not that much different to being on a nuclear sub for months and months on end, smaller I guess.
      - yomly 8y ago
        Do the subs not have internet access or comms to outside world?
        adrianN 8y ago
        Nuclear subs predate the Internet and I suppose you also want to limit your non-internet comm activity when sitting somewhere in the ocean waiting for a Russian first strike.
        roywiggins 8y ago
        Radio waves don't work great under the oceans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
        beamatronic 8y ago
        They do indeed perform a “sync” when they surface briefly.
      - overcast 8y ago
        Considering submarines and prisons historically aren't coed, I'd say space travel fares a bit better for basic human needs.
        monkeynotes 8y ago
        Same sex relationships in prisons and subs aside, I actually think intimate relationships between a confined team that works and lives together is a bad idea. The team needs to depend on each other hugely and having the emotional demands of a intimate relationship could make things pretty difficult for those involved directly or indirectly. Obviously relationships will develop regardless, you put people together they are going to do stuff. It's just a another challenge, in my mind, rather than an advantage.
        overcast 8y ago
    - jobigoud 8y ago
      VR headsets should be pretty decent by then, so a virtual walk in the park might be doable. Either on the treadmill or flying around trees in zero G.
    - spapas82 8y ago
      If I was there I'd get a copy of all tutorials on https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x along with my favourite batteries included programming language... Actully, now that I think better of it I wouldn't need a batteries included language; having so much time I could implement the "batteries" myself!
    - heartles 8y ago
      That makes me wonder, what kind of bandwidth could you get out there? Obviously latency will be bad, but if bandwidth is good enough they might still be able to download a data pack daily containing messages from loved ones, news, and the occasional movie
      - Tepix 8y ago
        Lasers are getting more common for high speed space comms, i think the range isn't quite there yet to manage the Earth-Mars distance.
    - pronoiac 8y ago
      Cuba has "Paquete Semanal," a weekly-updated offline selective mirror of the Internet, passed around via hard drives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-i...
  - s0l1dsnak3123 8y ago
    > You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Speak for yourself! :D
    - Casseres 8y ago
      Triopoly: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly The description says "three-dimensional" but I would argue that it's two-dimensional and regular Monopoly is one-dimensional (linear). I think with a lot of time on your hands, you could make Monopoly truely three-dimensional with layers, and then even four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time.
      - ReverseCold 8y ago
        > four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time Or use a fourth spatial dimension, like a 4D Rubik's Cube or Miegakure.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        4-dimensional Monopoly. Reminds me of Continuum series. Is getting a seat in the Corporate Congress a victory or defeat condition?
  - Shivetya 8y ago
    The vetting system will have to be tailored very strict to insure they have the right personality and drive to survive such a mission. I could swear I have read of such testing to have taken place already to get some benchmarks to apply to actual travelers.
    - OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
      "right personality" I.E. boring, un-energetic people who have little sense of personal space.
      - pc86 8y ago
        Yes because when I read the biographies of the the latest round of astronaut trainee, it's a total snooze fest.
      - cryoshon 8y ago
        hey, just because you wouldn't want to spend time around them doesn't mean that society doesn't need them. i think your description is correct, but still. there's a lot to be said for the virtues of being eminently stable. besides, the creative people can do the thinking for them from earth.
      - l1n 8y ago
        I'd say creative doesn't hurt: honestly, I know quite a few folks who would kill to run a D&D campaign or the like uninterrupted for months on end. And your players won't have other obligations to catch them off guard :)
  - galieos_ghost 8y ago
    Humans got by for thousands of years by simply gathering around the fire and telling stories. I think people could adapt to not having something(the internet) that humans didn't have at all until the last few decades. It's fairly disturbing that some people can't even imagine surviving without modern conveniences.
    - pc86 8y ago
      Surely you can understand the differences between being a pre-agricultural tribe on the Serengeti with absolute freedom and being one of 5 people from probably 3-4 countries sitting in an aluminum tube the size of a small boat.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    > The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. This isn't as silly as it sounds. Netflix already offers boxes ISPs can put in their datacenter. They store the entire library locally. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ Plop Wikipedia, Netflix, a daily snapshot of news, social media, Reddit, etc. on one and you've probably got enough for most folks.
    - dtech 8y ago
      I believe it's not the entire library, bus a dynamically maintained cache of the most popular content over that connection. More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship.
      - ceejayoz 8y ago
        > I believe it's not the entire library https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592590450 https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592... > According to Netflix's own documentation, "An individual appliance can oﬄoad approximately 60%-80% of content requests depending on country catalog size," but when units start working in pairs, the storage size can exceed the size of Netflix's library for a region. And when this happens, the pair will use their excess storage to double up on stuff to help deal with high demand, or to make sure that if one fails, the other still has as much content as possible. > More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship. No need to have the entire internet, just the most popular tenth of a percent, and just daily updates of what's new. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html is currently downloading from Mars at 3 megabit. I'd expect Earth-to-Mars can be much faster than Mars-to-Earth from a car-sized orbiter with a small dish and limited power. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 indicates optical Mars-to-Earth links of 1 Gbps soon, as well. For Netflix, just send a new box every 3-6 months on the next rocket. The ISS already gets in-theater movies well before they're released on DVD, so you could even have release dates synchronized for no delay whatsoever!
  - noonespecial 8y ago
    Even without "cryosleep" or the combined download of the world's entertainment aboard, the crossing will be a walk in the park compared to what explorers on early sailing ships endured. Plus they probably won't get scurvy, so there is that.
  - txcwpalpha 8y ago
    Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. There's an ongoing/recurring experiment that NASA runs where a group of pretend-astronauts spends several months in a pretend Mars habitat with limited internet connection to Earth [1]. A podcast [2] was recently released where they go in-depth and interview the participants, and they touch on the whole "what am I supposed to do without the internet for 6 months?" issue a lot, but it never really seems to be that big of an issue. They do get bored, but most of the participants do stuff like learn a new language, study a textbook, or read a lot of novels. They also have a lot of "work" (like experiments etc) to keep them busy every day. 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges-after-8-months-of-isolation-2017-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges... 2: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat
    - PyroLagus 8y ago
      > Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. Yes, but they weren't trapped in a metal box for years.
  - alex_duf 8y ago
    Yeah, I would recommend embedding wikipedia, duolingo, a whole bunch of TV series and movies, the top 10% of spotify, the top 10% of youtube, and the top 10% of steam. It's not perfect but assuming you can make a static version of these I'm sure you can fit it under a few terabytes.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
    They could write an operating system.
  - CM30 8y ago
    Download a ton of video games for the crew? I mean, ROMs for old systems are pretty easy to get by the bucketload, and careful use of stuff like GOG could get plenty of hours of DRM free entertainment for space travel related purposes. But yeah, I think a sample of the internet stored offline could work. Maybe mix that with a P2P system that lets people post pages, social media posts, etc with other people on the ship, like you can with IPFS/Freenet/ZeroNet/whatever.
  - grawprog 8y ago
    >You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Says you.
- adrianN 8y ago
  The interplanetary net will probably look a lot like Usenet.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Not bad!
  - TruthSHIFT 8y ago
    That sounds pretty great.
  - jpm_sd 8y ago
    This concept was excitingly dramatized (and lovingly parodied) in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", a 90s sci-fi classic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
- te0006 8y ago
  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 "Delay-Tolerant Networking Architecture This document describes an architecture for delay-tolerant and disruption-tolerant networks, and is an evolution of the architecture originally designed for the Interplanetary Internet, a communication system envisioned to provide Internet-like services across interplanetary distances in support of deep space exploration."
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    Or you could use UUCP.
    - Isamu 8y ago
      Usenet will make a comeback! Over interplanetary UUCP.
  - amelius 8y ago
    The problem is that servers on Earth may still fail with timeouts of different kinds above the networking level. For example, when requesting a video stream from Netflix, they may send some control packets along, and with round-trip times of >1 minute, the server may think that your client is behaving erratically, and disconnect you.
    - yoz-y 8y ago
      They could have a proxy that would buffer requests and received data and then use the delay tolerant protocol to send that to spacecraft I suppose?
    - ss248 8y ago
      Easily solvable with something like proxy server on earth. Also i don't think it's smart to directly connect spaceship to the internet, so proxy should already be there in the original design.
      - amelius 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
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- lossolo 8y ago
  I don't think anyone is even considering to use TCP for interplanetary communication. You would use other protocol to communicate between planets and then only on earth you would switch to TCP or other protocol (depending what you would like to do) for fetching data from internet. Then get the data through proxy on earth and deliver it through this protocol to the other planet.
- Retric 8y ago
  The internet is not limited to TCP/IP many phones browsers used a different protocol to connect to a proxy server which downgraded images to save bandwidth. A similar approach means a website might take a 4+ minutes to start downloading but would finish in under a second and allow for video streaming etc. Sure not all websites would work, but you could easily use Reddit, YouTube, and email.
  - zingmars 8y ago
    I'm not so sure about YouTube. It's a huge distance, and the potential for data loss somewhere in the middle is pretty large and video consumes a lot of bandwidth. E-mail might be doable, but for reddit you would need A LOT of patience since it's going to take ages to load the cat picture you just clicked on.
    - Retric 8y ago
      YouTube for a few people is fairly low bandwidth data, so they can probably just send several copies of the same stream preferably after re encoding it. Unless the packet loss is extreme it's not going to be an issue. For Reddit, I would assume they would start downloading before you click on something. It eat's bandwidth, but again bandwidth is a non issue it's really just latency.
- blhack 8y ago
  Ah, this actually seems okay to me. My web browser use is often opening several tabs in the background while I read the one I am on. A four minute delay for the background ones sounds fine (if I'm on my way to mars, that is. For my home connection obviously this would be awful).
- throwaway2016a 8y ago
  I'm guessing there would be some sort of CDN edge node with optimistic pre-caching. I'm sure Netflix would be willing to set up a Netflix Open Connect box on Mars so at least they can binge watch Stranger Things and The Santa Clarita Diet. Plus, put enough people (a few hundred?) on mars and and the content they could produce on their own local domain might be compelling.
- lisper 8y ago
  Ironically, I cannot read the original article because I'm on a boat with a satellite internet connection. Ping times are only 750ms, but the web is still barely usable. I can read HN because it's text-only, but that's about it. Visitors to Mars definitely won't be streaming Netflix. (But they'll probably have an SSD with a nice video library on it!)
- soperj 8y ago
  >the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. Yeah I don't understand this at all. Currently there is a Space Station circling the earth which people spend months at a time on, and they're busy as all hell. I doubt there will be nothing to do on a trip to Mars.
- NickBusey 8y ago
  This is literally what IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ was created to solve.
  - alex_duf 8y ago
    Without knowing I would assume IPFS is built on TCP, wouldn't that be an issue?
    - carry_bit 8y ago
      It's built on a generic interface so other protocols could be used.
    - lgierth 8y ago
      More transports coming! IPFS is built on libp2p, and so far all available libp2p transports have been stream-oriented (TCP, Websockets, WebRTC, Onion, QUIC), but different types of transports are in the works: packet-oriented (UDP, Ethernet, WebRTC-unreliable) and store-and-forward. Apart from that IPFS is built and layered in a way that makes the application layer independent of transport semantics - the network in terms of connections and hosts is abstracted away.
cain 8y ago
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NIAC_Torpor_Habitat_for_Human_Stasis.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NIAC_Torpor_H...
- plopz 8y ago
  Here's where that comes from: https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habitat-for-human-stasis-to-mars https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habita... Looks like its from 2013
  - willidiots 8y ago
    This looks like a private venture that was selected - along with 11 other ventures - for $100,000 in NASA funding back in 2013: https://www.nasa.gov/content/niac-2013-phase-i-and-phase-ii-selections https://www.nasa.gov/content/niac-2013-phase-i-and-phase-ii-... Nothing more recent than 2016 on their own website for "human stasis": http://spaceworkseng.com/tag/human-stasis/ http://spaceworkseng.com/tag/human-stasis/ Why is this news?
    - sgtmas2006 8y ago
      Somebody wanted it to be.
- cryoshon 8y ago
  interesting presentation! i think it's interesting how they dismiss cryonics out of hand as not viable nor yielding any useful insights -- says a lot about that field's lack of scientific basis.
fpgaminer 8y ago
This got me thinking about stasis pods (as opposed to the hibernation pods in the article). When I think of stasis pods I always think of space travel. But ... now I wonder how many people on Earth would use them? I can see plenty of people in the valley being rich enough and crazy enough to stasis themselves so they can see the future and reap its benefits. But maybe it's not crazy. If given the choice; would you choose to live now, or in the future? There aren't many people I know who aren't cynical about the present. The more I think about it, the more I wonder just how _many_ people might do it. But then, when would you stop? Would you wake up in 100 years, experience the new, brighter future, only to become cynical again and jump to the next era? What would our world be like if we were carrying around half our population in stasis pods? all of them hopping from one era to the next, never satisfied. Sci-fi technology always seems to provoke the most interesting human dilemmas.
- wgerard 8y ago
  > But maybe it's not crazy. If given the choice; would you choose to live now, or in the future? There aren't many people I know who aren't cynical about the present. The more I think about it, the more I wonder just how _many_ people might do it. If you're truly cynical about the present, I actually think stasis would be a far worse option: 1) If you're really cynical about things like climate change, thermonuclear war, etc. the future could easily be much, much worse than the present. Imagine waking up out of stasis to find yourself in the world from "The Road". 2) If you're cynical but with a glimmer of hope, you're essentially banking on the idea that not everyone like yourself will go into stasis. Otherwise, how would things ever get better?
  - ColanR 8y ago
    I've seen point 2 covered before...https://xkcd.com/989/ https://xkcd.com/989/
  - dexterdog 8y ago
    It would certainly be a good alternative to suicide
- 8y ago
jaytaylor 8y ago
Since presumably they won't be exercising while in cryo sleep, how will the astronauts loss of bone and muscle mass while in zero-g be addressed?
xevb3k 8y ago
This is a big deal. Cryosleep is probably the most likely change to occur in our lifetimes that could bring about significant social change. Given that it slows your metabolism, I think it’s likely that we’ll be able to extend overall lifespan. Effectively we maybe able to put people to sleep, and have them wake up 50 years later. Those “temporal refugees” will of course be completely out of sync with society, and like a living message from the past. Of all the weird sci-fi stuff, I think this is the most likely to actually happen and the impact could be massive.
- thatcherc 8y ago
  If you're interested in more of the (fictional) uses and problems presented by this technology, you might enjoy reading Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, which makes some use of hibernation in its plot. It is the sequel to The Three Body Problem, a hard sci-fi book that would probably be enjoyed by a lot of HNers.
  - drdeadringer 8y ago
    Larry Niven also has some exploration into these matters.
  - csisvunit 8y ago
    Also, Amazon is dropping $1B to produce The Three Body Problem. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the-three-body-problem-tv-adaptation-show-amazon-a8278066.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the...
    - thatcherc 8y ago
      That's incredible! I'm very excited to see how they do with that. It's also amazing that 1 billion dollars can be spent making a TV series today. A quick looks on Google shows that an episode of Game of Thrones (chosen because it seems like a really high budget show) costs ~$10-$15 million, so Amazon's Three Body is roughly equivalent to 6-10 seasons of GoT. Wild!
    - deleted 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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killjoywashere 8y ago
As a physician who has submitted multiple job applications to SpaceX, I would decline space travel if this procedure was a requirement. The TPN requirement alone vastly more risky than just living 4 years of life in a spaceship. Building giant centrifugal units in space for gravity simulation makes more sense.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  Thanks. I had a family member on TPN, and you confirmed my impression from the docs: nutrition is hard and TPN usage is risky, especially for long-term use. It's not like the movies. What are the biggest risks? Or can you point us toward a more comprehensive description?
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    Infections are the major issue with TPN (you're basically mainlining glucose). Keeping someone sedated for 2 weeks will significantly increased their risk of thromboembolic disease (cooling them also increases the risk of thrombus). The sedation meds are going to be hard on their livers, kidneys, etc. The antibiotics necessary to prevent infections will also be hard on their livers, possibly kidneys. This would all require management by a critical care intensivist (anasthesiologist, pulmonologist, etc), who would escalate problems too ... where? You're taking astronauts and turning them into ICU patients. This seems incredibly bad.
neurotech1 8y ago
There has been real research on this, led by Dr. Peter Rhee [0] the famous trauma surgeon who treated former Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords after she was critically injured. There are various terms like "protective hypothermia"[2] used or "targeted temperature management"[3] and these methods have been used in brain surgery for decades. [4] Suspended animation [5] is the more publicly known term, although often inaccurate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_M._Rhee#Research_interests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_M._Rhee#Research_interes... [1] https://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/7539/doctors-suspend-trauma-patients-then-revive-them-back-life https://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/7539/doctors-suspend-tra... [2] https://www.americannursetoday.com/therapeutic-hypothermia-after-cardiac-arrest-what-why-who-and-how/ https://www.americannursetoday.com/therapeutic-hypothermia-a... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_temperature_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_temperature_managemen... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_arrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_a... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation
WalterBright 8y ago
> At least they will probably have wifi. These days it will be practical to include an enormous reading library.

142 points by evo_9 8y ago

> the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. At least they will probably have wifi. If only. TCP at those latencies will be completely unusable. Even if you manage to “trick” TCP with a middlebox that fakes ACKs you’d still be waiting minutes just for an HTTPS connection to establish.

pc86 8y ago
The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. Seriously though, they'll need to have some sort of non-work, non-research activities to last the months it will take to get anywhere. You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times.
- overcast 8y ago
  Stock up on movies, and books? I mean that's pretty much the daily life of most people on this planet right now. Go to work, come home, engage in entertainment / sex. Beyond that, they can't really expect to be able to go outside and walk in the park. I think everyone is overestimating how much free time these guys will have. It's not the equivalent of sitting in a prison cell without mission responsibilities(experiments, chores, food).
  - monkeynotes 8y ago
    Exercise, books, chess, learn a language, I can think of plenty of stuff to do. People in prison sometimes enjoy the opportunity they have to focus on self improvement without the stress of having to make money for food/shelter. Surely being on a craft in deep space is not that much different to being on a nuclear sub for months and months on end, smaller I guess.
    - yomly 8y ago
      Do the subs not have internet access or comms to outside world?
      - adrianN 8y ago
        Nuclear subs predate the Internet and I suppose you also want to limit your non-internet comm activity when sitting somewhere in the ocean waiting for a Russian first strike.
      - roywiggins 8y ago
        Radio waves don't work great under the oceans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
      - beamatronic 8y ago
        They do indeed perform a “sync” when they surface briefly.
    - overcast 8y ago
      Considering submarines and prisons historically aren't coed, I'd say space travel fares a bit better for basic human needs.
      - monkeynotes 8y ago
        Same sex relationships in prisons and subs aside, I actually think intimate relationships between a confined team that works and lives together is a bad idea. The team needs to depend on each other hugely and having the emotional demands of a intimate relationship could make things pretty difficult for those involved directly or indirectly. Obviously relationships will develop regardless, you put people together they are going to do stuff. It's just a another challenge, in my mind, rather than an advantage.
        overcast 8y ago
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    VR headsets should be pretty decent by then, so a virtual walk in the park might be doable. Either on the treadmill or flying around trees in zero G.
  - spapas82 8y ago
    If I was there I'd get a copy of all tutorials on https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x along with my favourite batteries included programming language... Actully, now that I think better of it I wouldn't need a batteries included language; having so much time I could implement the "batteries" myself!
  - heartles 8y ago
    That makes me wonder, what kind of bandwidth could you get out there? Obviously latency will be bad, but if bandwidth is good enough they might still be able to download a data pack daily containing messages from loved ones, news, and the occasional movie
    - Tepix 8y ago
      Lasers are getting more common for high speed space comms, i think the range isn't quite there yet to manage the Earth-Mars distance.
  - pronoiac 8y ago
    Cuba has "Paquete Semanal," a weekly-updated offline selective mirror of the Internet, passed around via hard drives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-i...
- s0l1dsnak3123 8y ago
  > You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Speak for yourself! :D
  - Casseres 8y ago
    Triopoly: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3758/triopoly The description says "three-dimensional" but I would argue that it's two-dimensional and regular Monopoly is one-dimensional (linear). I think with a lot of time on your hands, you could make Monopoly truely three-dimensional with layers, and then even four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time.
    - ReverseCold 8y ago
      > four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time Or use a fourth spatial dimension, like a 4D Rubik's Cube or Miegakure.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      4-dimensional Monopoly. Reminds me of Continuum series. Is getting a seat in the Corporate Congress a victory or defeat condition?
- Shivetya 8y ago
  The vetting system will have to be tailored very strict to insure they have the right personality and drive to survive such a mission. I could swear I have read of such testing to have taken place already to get some benchmarks to apply to actual travelers.
  - OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
    "right personality" I.E. boring, un-energetic people who have little sense of personal space.
    - pc86 8y ago
      Yes because when I read the biographies of the the latest round of astronaut trainee, it's a total snooze fest.
    - cryoshon 8y ago
      hey, just because you wouldn't want to spend time around them doesn't mean that society doesn't need them. i think your description is correct, but still. there's a lot to be said for the virtues of being eminently stable. besides, the creative people can do the thinking for them from earth.
    - l1n 8y ago
      I'd say creative doesn't hurt: honestly, I know quite a few folks who would kill to run a D&D campaign or the like uninterrupted for months on end. And your players won't have other obligations to catch them off guard :)
- galieos_ghost 8y ago
  Humans got by for thousands of years by simply gathering around the fire and telling stories. I think people could adapt to not having something(the internet) that humans didn't have at all until the last few decades. It's fairly disturbing that some people can't even imagine surviving without modern conveniences.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Surely you can understand the differences between being a pre-agricultural tribe on the Serengeti with absolute freedom and being one of 5 people from probably 3-4 countries sitting in an aluminum tube the size of a small boat.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  > The obvious solution is to download the entire internet onto the spacecraft. This isn't as silly as it sounds. Netflix already offers boxes ISPs can put in their datacenter. They store the entire library locally. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ Plop Wikipedia, Netflix, a daily snapshot of news, social media, Reddit, etc. on one and you've probably got enough for most folks.
  - dtech 8y ago
    I believe it's not the entire library, bus a dynamically maintained cache of the most popular content over that connection. More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      > I believe it's not the entire library https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592590450 https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592... > According to Netflix's own documentation, "An individual appliance can oﬄoad approximately 60%-80% of content requests depending on country catalog size," but when units start working in pairs, the storage size can exceed the size of Netflix's library for a region. And when this happens, the pair will use their excess storage to double up on stuff to help deal with high demand, or to make sure that if one fails, the other still has as much content as possible. > More seriously, the problem is a static dump will get old very quickly, and keeping the internet "up-to-date" will require an enormous bandwidth to the spaceship. No need to have the entire internet, just the most popular tenth of a percent, and just daily updates of what's new. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html is currently downloading from Mars at 3 megabit. I'd expect Earth-to-Mars can be much faster than Mars-to-Earth from a car-sized orbiter with a small dish and limited power. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19950183 indicates optical Mars-to-Earth links of 1 Gbps soon, as well. For Netflix, just send a new box every 3-6 months on the next rocket. The ISS already gets in-theater movies well before they're released on DVD, so you could even have release dates synchronized for no delay whatsoever!
- noonespecial 8y ago
  Even without "cryosleep" or the combined download of the world's entertainment aboard, the crossing will be a walk in the park compared to what explorers on early sailing ships endured. Plus they probably won't get scurvy, so there is that.
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. There's an ongoing/recurring experiment that NASA runs where a group of pretend-astronauts spends several months in a pretend Mars habitat with limited internet connection to Earth [1]. A podcast [2] was recently released where they go in-depth and interview the participants, and they touch on the whole "what am I supposed to do without the internet for 6 months?" issue a lot, but it never really seems to be that big of an issue. They do get bored, but most of the participants do stuff like learn a new language, study a textbook, or read a lot of novels. They also have a lot of "work" (like experiments etc) to keep them busy every day. 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges-after-8-months-of-isolation-2017-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mars-research-crew-emerges... 2: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat
  - PyroLagus 8y ago
    > Civilization survived for ages without the internet, so I'm sure that we'll be able to find some way to keep people occupied while in space without it. Yes, but they weren't trapped in a metal box for years.
- alex_duf 8y ago
  Yeah, I would recommend embedding wikipedia, duolingo, a whole bunch of TV series and movies, the top 10% of spotify, the top 10% of youtube, and the top 10% of steam. It's not perfect but assuming you can make a static version of these I'm sure you can fit it under a few terabytes.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
  They could write an operating system.
- CM30 8y ago
  Download a ton of video games for the crew? I mean, ROMs for old systems are pretty easy to get by the bucketload, and careful use of stuff like GOG could get plenty of hours of DRM free entertainment for space travel related purposes. But yeah, I think a sample of the internet stored offline could work. Maybe mix that with a P2P system that lets people post pages, social media posts, etc with other people on the ship, like you can with IPFS/Freenet/ZeroNet/whatever.
- grawprog 8y ago
  >You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times. Says you.
adrianN 8y ago
The interplanetary net will probably look a lot like Usenet.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Not bad!
- TruthSHIFT 8y ago
  That sounds pretty great.
- jpm_sd 8y ago
  This concept was excitingly dramatized (and lovingly parodied) in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", a 90s sci-fi classic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
te0006 8y ago
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4838 "Delay-Tolerant Networking Architecture This document describes an architecture for delay-tolerant and disruption-tolerant networks, and is an evolution of the architecture originally designed for the Interplanetary Internet, a communication system envisioned to provide Internet-like services across interplanetary distances in support of deep space exploration."
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Or you could use UUCP.
  - Isamu 8y ago
    Usenet will make a comeback! Over interplanetary UUCP.
- amelius 8y ago
  The problem is that servers on Earth may still fail with timeouts of different kinds above the networking level. For example, when requesting a video stream from Netflix, they may send some control packets along, and with round-trip times of >1 minute, the server may think that your client is behaving erratically, and disconnect you.
  - yoz-y 8y ago
    They could have a proxy that would buffer requests and received data and then use the delay tolerant protocol to send that to spacecraft I suppose?
  - ss248 8y ago
    Easily solvable with something like proxy server on earth. Also i don't think it's smart to directly connect spaceship to the internet, so proxy should already be there in the original design.
    - amelius 8y ago
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lossolo 8y ago
I don't think anyone is even considering to use TCP for interplanetary communication. You would use other protocol to communicate between planets and then only on earth you would switch to TCP or other protocol (depending what you would like to do) for fetching data from internet. Then get the data through proxy on earth and deliver it through this protocol to the other planet.
Retric 8y ago
The internet is not limited to TCP/IP many phones browsers used a different protocol to connect to a proxy server which downgraded images to save bandwidth. A similar approach means a website might take a 4+ minutes to start downloading but would finish in under a second and allow for video streaming etc. Sure not all websites would work, but you could easily use Reddit, YouTube, and email.
- zingmars 8y ago
  I'm not so sure about YouTube. It's a huge distance, and the potential for data loss somewhere in the middle is pretty large and video consumes a lot of bandwidth. E-mail might be doable, but for reddit you would need A LOT of patience since it's going to take ages to load the cat picture you just clicked on.
  - Retric 8y ago
    YouTube for a few people is fairly low bandwidth data, so they can probably just send several copies of the same stream preferably after re encoding it. Unless the packet loss is extreme it's not going to be an issue. For Reddit, I would assume they would start downloading before you click on something. It eat's bandwidth, but again bandwidth is a non issue it's really just latency.
blhack 8y ago
Ah, this actually seems okay to me. My web browser use is often opening several tabs in the background while I read the one I am on. A four minute delay for the background ones sounds fine (if I'm on my way to mars, that is. For my home connection obviously this would be awful).
throwaway2016a 8y ago
I'm guessing there would be some sort of CDN edge node with optimistic pre-caching. I'm sure Netflix would be willing to set up a Netflix Open Connect box on Mars so at least they can binge watch Stranger Things and The Santa Clarita Diet. Plus, put enough people (a few hundred?) on mars and and the content they could produce on their own local domain might be compelling.
lisper 8y ago
Ironically, I cannot read the original article because I'm on a boat with a satellite internet connection. Ping times are only 750ms, but the web is still barely usable. I can read HN because it's text-only, but that's about it. Visitors to Mars definitely won't be streaming Netflix. (But they'll probably have an SSD with a nice video library on it!)
soperj 8y ago
>the first crews to Mars may have to deal with day after day of seeing nothing but the star-flecked blackness of space. Yeah I don't understand this at all. Currently there is a Space Station circling the earth which people spend months at a time on, and they're busy as all hell. I doubt there will be nothing to do on a trip to Mars.
NickBusey 8y ago
This is literally what IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ was created to solve.
- alex_duf 8y ago
  Without knowing I would assume IPFS is built on TCP, wouldn't that be an issue?
  - carry_bit 8y ago
    It's built on a generic interface so other protocols could be used.
  - lgierth 8y ago
    More transports coming! IPFS is built on libp2p, and so far all available libp2p transports have been stream-oriented (TCP, Websockets, WebRTC, Onion, QUIC), but different types of transports are in the works: packet-oriented (UDP, Ethernet, WebRTC-unreliable) and store-and-forward. Apart from that IPFS is built and layered in a way that makes the application layer independent of transport semantics - the network in terms of connections and hosts is abstracted away.

cain 8y ago

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NIAC_Torpor_Habitat_for_Human_Stasis.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NIAC_Torpor_H...

plopz 8y ago
Here's where that comes from: https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habitat-for-human-stasis-to-mars https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habita... Looks like its from 2013
- willidiots 8y ago
  This looks like a private venture that was selected - along with 11 other ventures - for $100,000 in NASA funding back in 2013: https://www.nasa.gov/content/niac-2013-phase-i-and-phase-ii-selections https://www.nasa.gov/content/niac-2013-phase-i-and-phase-ii-... Nothing more recent than 2016 on their own website for "human stasis": http://spaceworkseng.com/tag/human-stasis/ http://spaceworkseng.com/tag/human-stasis/ Why is this news?
  - sgtmas2006 8y ago
    Somebody wanted it to be.
cryoshon 8y ago
interesting presentation! i think it's interesting how they dismiss cryonics out of hand as not viable nor yielding any useful insights -- says a lot about that field's lack of scientific basis.

fpgaminer 8y ago

This got me thinking about stasis pods (as opposed to the hibernation pods in the article). When I think of stasis pods I always think of space travel. But ... now I wonder how many people on Earth would use them? I can see plenty of people in the valley being rich enough and crazy enough to stasis themselves so they can see the future and reap its benefits. But maybe it's not crazy. If given the choice; would you choose to live now, or in the future? There aren't many people I know who aren't cynical about the present. The more I think about it, the more I wonder just how _many_ people might do it. But then, when would you stop? Would you wake up in 100 years, experience the new, brighter future, only to become cynical again and jump to the next era? What would our world be like if we were carrying around half our population in stasis pods? all of them hopping from one era to the next, never satisfied. Sci-fi technology always seems to provoke the most interesting human dilemmas.

wgerard 8y ago
> But maybe it's not crazy. If given the choice; would you choose to live now, or in the future? There aren't many people I know who aren't cynical about the present. The more I think about it, the more I wonder just how _many_ people might do it. If you're truly cynical about the present, I actually think stasis would be a far worse option: 1) If you're really cynical about things like climate change, thermonuclear war, etc. the future could easily be much, much worse than the present. Imagine waking up out of stasis to find yourself in the world from "The Road". 2) If you're cynical but with a glimmer of hope, you're essentially banking on the idea that not everyone like yourself will go into stasis. Otherwise, how would things ever get better?
- ColanR 8y ago
  I've seen point 2 covered before...https://xkcd.com/989/ https://xkcd.com/989/
- dexterdog 8y ago
  It would certainly be a good alternative to suicide
8y ago

jaytaylor 8y ago

Since presumably they won't be exercising while in cryo sleep, how will the astronauts loss of bone and muscle mass while in zero-g be addressed?

xevb3k 8y ago

This is a big deal. Cryosleep is probably the most likely change to occur in our lifetimes that could bring about significant social change. Given that it slows your metabolism, I think it’s likely that we’ll be able to extend overall lifespan. Effectively we maybe able to put people to sleep, and have them wake up 50 years later. Those “temporal refugees” will of course be completely out of sync with society, and like a living message from the past. Of all the weird sci-fi stuff, I think this is the most likely to actually happen and the impact could be massive.

thatcherc 8y ago
If you're interested in more of the (fictional) uses and problems presented by this technology, you might enjoy reading Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, which makes some use of hibernation in its plot. It is the sequel to The Three Body Problem, a hard sci-fi book that would probably be enjoyed by a lot of HNers.
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  Larry Niven also has some exploration into these matters.
- csisvunit 8y ago
  Also, Amazon is dropping $1B to produce The Three Body Problem. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the-three-body-problem-tv-adaptation-show-amazon-a8278066.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the...
  - thatcherc 8y ago
    That's incredible! I'm very excited to see how they do with that. It's also amazing that 1 billion dollars can be spent making a TV series today. A quick looks on Google shows that an episode of Game of Thrones (chosen because it seems like a really high budget show) costs ~$10-$15 million, so Amazon's Three Body is roughly equivalent to 6-10 seasons of GoT. Wild!
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killjoywashere 8y ago

As a physician who has submitted multiple job applications to SpaceX, I would decline space travel if this procedure was a requirement. The TPN requirement alone vastly more risky than just living 4 years of life in a spaceship. Building giant centrifugal units in space for gravity simulation makes more sense.

jessriedel 8y ago
Thanks. I had a family member on TPN, and you confirmed my impression from the docs: nutrition is hard and TPN usage is risky, especially for long-term use. It's not like the movies. What are the biggest risks? Or can you point us toward a more comprehensive description?
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Infections are the major issue with TPN (you're basically mainlining glucose). Keeping someone sedated for 2 weeks will significantly increased their risk of thromboembolic disease (cooling them also increases the risk of thrombus). The sedation meds are going to be hard on their livers, kidneys, etc. The antibiotics necessary to prevent infections will also be hard on their livers, possibly kidneys. This would all require management by a critical care intensivist (anasthesiologist, pulmonologist, etc), who would escalate problems too ... where? You're taking astronauts and turning them into ICU patients. This seems incredibly bad.

neurotech1 8y ago

There has been real research on this, led by Dr. Peter Rhee [0] the famous trauma surgeon who treated former Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords after she was critically injured. There are various terms like "protective hypothermia"[2] used or "targeted temperature management"[3] and these methods have been used in brain surgery for decades. [4] Suspended animation [5] is the more publicly known term, although often inaccurate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_M._Rhee#Research_interests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_M._Rhee#Research_interes... [1] https://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/7539/doctors-suspend-trauma-patients-then-revive-them-back-life https://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/7539/doctors-suspend-tra... [2] https://www.americannursetoday.com/therapeutic-hypothermia-after-cardiac-arrest-what-why-who-and-how/ https://www.americannursetoday.com/therapeutic-hypothermia-a... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_temperature_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_temperature_managemen... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_arrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_a... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation

WalterBright 8y ago

> At least they will probably have wifi. These days it will be practical to include an enormous reading library.