Posthuman Blues

Travelling to Mars and hibernating like a brown bear

"The research could also lead to far-reaching applications in the medical field such as prolonging the useful life of a transplant organ or even heart-transplant operations while patients are in a state of hypo-metabolism."

As the ESA article admits, hibernation is not a serious consideration for the first manned mission to Mars. I'm more intrigued by the biomedical applications. This is a step in the right direction for cryonics research, which seeks to freeze patients without destroying vital cell structures.

One of the biggest hurdles to cryonics at present is that the patient must be declared legally dead before cryonicists can set to work reducing cell damage; this invariably results in destruction that could be prevented if cryonicists were allowed access to a terminal patient before clinical death.

Long-term biostasis might bridge the schism between mainstream medicine and the cryonics community because it eliminates actual death ("deanimation"). A person suffering from an incurable disease might choose to have himself put into hibernation until such time as a cure is developed. It's the same gamble made by cryonics patients, of course, but cryonics must deal not only with curing present-day maladies, but "reanimating" patient's "dead" bodies -- presumably with the help of nanotechnology of the sort described in K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation." Hibernation -- if we can achieve it -- does away with the need for quasi-exotic cell-repair technologies.

In college, I spoke at length with former CryoCare president Charles Platt (author of "The Silicon Man") about my prospects as a cryonaut. Truthfully, I imagined that I'd be signed up by now. So why aren't I?

Good question.