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Considering how many diseases could be treated by a pause button on metabolism, I would expect this technology to mature in clinics and hospitals long before we get them on spaceships.
Can you give some examples that's really interesting
The major problem that needs solved before that even... Cancer.
Radiation once you leave our magnetic fields is going to be lethal working just a few months... Seeing as how Mars doesn't have any, the only shielding is what they bring...
Check out some of the data NASA has collected
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110006343/downloads/20110006343.pdf
Three years? A low energy transfer orbit gets you to Mars in less than a year. In the past, theoretical crewed missions were planned with an 8-9 month travel time. With enough propellant, could get that down to just over three months. And that's with chemical rockets, not some hypothetical nuclear or torch drive.
More importantly .... what exactly is gained by this incredibly risky biochemical process?
- Less need for food supplies (seems like recycling/growing more is less challenging than human hibernation)
- Ummm less boredom?
It seems orders of magnitude cheaper, safer, and with more immediately Earth-beneficial spinoffs to focus on making more and better bio-recycling.
Humans who are active in space already have to spend a lot of work keeping up muscle and bone mass. Animals in hibernation under normal gravity also lose bone and muscle mass.
Imagine doubling that up, just to save a few sandwiches.
This highlights that, with the sheer trouble it takes to keep humans alive in space and the general trajectory of technology, sending probes instead of humans it makes a lot more sense.
I mean, our automated probes are really freakin' good now. And we get way more science and 'TV clips' back for the same investment. Why go to all the expense of figuring out hibernation so soon?
Well the goals of sending humans vs sending probes isn't wholly the same. Humans part of the goal is study how humans live there and potentially try to make permanent, ideally self sustaining, habitats there
That's just so impractical at the moment though.
Not that the research shouldn't be done, but I think it one should expect, say, humans to be genetically or cybernetically augmented by the time a sustained settlement is even on the horizon. Then what? What about autonomous systems that could set everything up ahead of time relatively trivially? These are all feasible compared to he immense cost of repeated interplanetary human space travel, and the sheer difficulty of keeping plain humans alive in space.
Where I'm coming from is something speculative like OA's early timeline: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/486e75a54a1ae
And that the future doesn't really look like Star Trek or Mass Effect, with plain humans running around and settling space.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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