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So this may be the basis of cryogenics? If you just cool down in specific way, you can turn off metabolism and then turn back on again at later date?
by sytelus 7y ago
So this may be the basis of cryogenics? If you just cool down in specific way, you can turn off metabolism and then turn back on again at later date?
- nradov 7y agoWell not really. Cooling the patient down will give you a few hours at most under ideal conditions. Metabolism isn't turned off, just slowed down. If you freeze the patient the ice crystals damage the cells so much that revival becomes impossible.
- the_pwner224 7y agoFlash freezing (using liquid nitrogen to freeze something really quickly) is used successfully for smaller objects, such as frozen berries and frozen vegetables that you can buy at the grocery store. The Wikipedia page on flash freezing links to this [0] site with some more discussion. The Wiki page also says that flash freezing still can take a few hours, so there are still ice crystals created, but a lot less/smaller than if you just put it in the freezer. Overall it seems it's just a matter of waiting for technology to advance to the point where we can very move a 150 pound 2-meter-tall 1-foot-deep object from 98 degrees to 30 degrees, and at that point the science fiction will become reality. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120111233417/http://www.biotech.ufl.edu/EM/data/freeze.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120111233417/http://www.biotec...
- simcop2387 7y agoThe size matters significantly for this. Much larger and it becomes difficult to remove the heat throughout fast enough to do a flash freeze.
- bduerst 7y agoThis is correct. Flash freezing an entire human body consistently would be incredibly difficult.
- ChrisRR 7y agoEven speaking as a brit, your mixture of metric and imperial and metric fascinates me. I personally would've written 150lb, 6'6 tall, 1ft deep, 37 to 0 degrees
- OJFord 7y ago150lb? That always strikes me as distinctly American, as opposed to 10st 10lb.
- saalweachter 7y agoI'm so glad America got away before y'all went stone-crazy. Redefining the hundredweight, seriously?
- OJFord 7y agoHey, for a '1,000 pennyer' I'll advocate for your pound-as-largest-unit madness.
- saalweachter 7y agoYou had options! The London stone for wool was 12.5 lbs, which would give you the same 8 stone to the hundredweight without redefining a hundredweight as 112 lbs. Or if you wanted to go the other way -- there were plenty of other definitions of the stone in use at the time, after all -- you could have gone with 16 pounds, to maintain parity with the dram and the ounce. Y'all still likely would have screwed up the hundredweight, as 128lb, but you might have at least fixed things by making the ton 16 hundredweight/2048 lb, which would at least have been some lovely binary fractions. But 14 pounds? That's just madness.
- ChrisRR 7y agoOops yes, I would actually have said 10 stone 10. I just copied the comment text because I was focusing on the 2 meters
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
- garmaine 7y agoCryonics involves vitrification, not freezing. Ice crystals do no damage if they never form in the first place. Now the method of achieving vitrification involves pumping the body full of toxic antifreeze. But in principle it's easier to flush the antifreeze out when warming than to reverse ice crystal damage, though the techniques have not yet been worked out. Thankfully it's not necessary for the reversal procedure to exist now for cryonics to be successfully used in preservation for the future.
- nradov 7y agoThere is zero chance that a human pumped full of antifreeze today will ever be successfully revised. Cryonics is a total scam by hucksters preying on desperate idiots. And don't bother telling me that it's worth doing if there's even a tiny chance. The chance is exactly 0, and those resources are better spent on the living.
- garmaine 7y agoYou have perfect knowledge of future technologies?
- brokenkebab 7y agoDoesn't it sound similar to "Prove that I cannot win a billion!" from someone who spends money in casino?
- Symmetry 7y agoThere's a big difference between telling someone they aren't going to win in the casino and telling them they have "zero chance" of winning. The later is false and is probably an ineffective argument because it's obviously false.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoYes, they should have said "roughly zero chance", which is true. They were just rounding down.
- Robotbeat 7y agoNot for cryogenics, unfortunately, but yes for hibernation. NASA has funded the study of medically induced torpor for hibernating humans for deep space exploration: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20180007195.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201800... If we ever do crewed interstellar travel, even if we can get the trip time down to 50 years or so, we’ll probably want something like this. But it’s useful even for Mars trips since you can fit a LOT more people in the same space.
- ekianjo 7y agoWould you need to feed nutrients people during hibernation or is that a state of extrenely low metabolism?
- Robotbeat 7y agoIt’s answered in the PDF. There’s nutrient delivery, but metabolic rate is halved so there’s less required.
- justinclift 7y agoInteresting. That PDF doesn't seem to include increased radiation exposure while having a slowed ability to repair the damage. Wonder if that's just because it's not viewed as important?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Robotbeat 7y agoThere may be less oxidative stress as well, so it’s tough to say what wins out. Anyway, there are methods of providing radiation shielding to occupants as well.
- garmaine 7y agoI think you mean cryonics, not cryogenics.