NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction | Hacker News Reader

NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction

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142 pointsevo_9112 comments

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.

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.

Larry Niven also has some exploration into these matters.

Also, Amazon is dropping $1B to produce The Three Body Problem.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the...

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!

Great trilogy that explores, among many things, hibernation. Highly recommend too.

I think the big use case would be to skip a couple of days or a week at a time. A week living in the real world, a week asleep. You don't miss much and you can effectively double your lifespan.

The change will probably be really hard on your body so you don't want to do it that often.

Or you set a trigger with your fund manager. You put in 100K and tell him to wake you when you have $2m (in today's dollars) or less than $50K.

Cryo API

I was thinking of this today: enter stasis and set a trigger to emerge only once one’s wealth has compounded to place them within the vaunted ”top 1%” or leave one in cryosleep indefinitely.

Except so many people would do that that it might as well be a death sentence since the cryo fees would eat away at your money faster than it could grow compared to all of the other people in the world.

Cryo fees and compound interest are separate concepts. Just because the second is present, doesn't mean the first one will grow. The opposite is true: When more people want something, you scale up production (or someone else does) and the prices (generally) go down.

I could imagine retirement homes where the residents sleep all week and just wake up for weekends or holidays, allowing them to extend their lifespan to see their descendants grow up.

Another use case: helping immobile patients who are morbidly obese lose weight.

"Effectively we maybe able to put people to sleep, and have them wake up 50 years later."

Or tell them they will wake up 50 years later and then just discard them once they are asleep.

I mean there's lots of things we could do to people and usually we don't. What makes you think we would do it to chrononauts more than, say, people in comas they're expected to wake up from?

ROI

The ROI might be more social, imagine reviving someone from hundreds of years ago, they'd be a living relic.

But then why not just discard them while they sleep at a hotel you own or AirBnb or something?

If you go to a hotel the people in your life expect you to come back in a reasonable amount of time and start asking questions if you don't.

And then you go to jail...

If there's a point where the cost of sustaining life during cryosleep goes to a fraction of the real returns on some modest investment vehicle like a mutual fund, I'd expect some of that social change would include economic disruption as thousands if not millions of people attempt to improve their lives with a century or so of compounded returns...

I will recommend Lockstep, a hard sci-fi novel that posits: what if we never achieve faster than light travel, but, do achieve perfect hibernation, what does society end up looking like.

It's a very fascinating book that constantly had me wishing that it delved deeper into aspects of its radically different societies.

http://amzn.com/B00H6E6ATI

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

Do the subs not have internet access or comms to outside world?

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.

Radio waves don't work great under the oceans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...

They do indeed perform a “sync” when they surface briefly.

Considering submarines and prisons historically aren't coed, I'd say space travel fares a bit better for basic human needs.

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.

No different than sex in the workplace, clearly not a good idea, obviously it's going to happen. You hang out with someone long enough, they start being attractive.

Gimlet Media has a fun podcast following a year-long mock space mission. It explores the topic of relationships in a confined space, too: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat

> 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.

If not for the criminal record being a huge factor in job applications later, I'd consider low-security prison to be a pretty good way of getting a sabbatical. It's almost like basic income.

In my state at least it's only for 7 years and only felonies or financial crimes. So you could always commit some non-financial misdemeanor and refuse to do any pretrial diversion program if you wanted, I guess.

That's why "prison is punishment" is supported by some people - if there should exist a social self-improvement program, shouldn't we be giving it to those whose behaviors we want to encourage?

I think the issue here really is that regular life became so fucked up that prison seems like a better option. Isolation from participating in society should be punishment on its own, but it isn't, given how the participation looks for most people.

Reminds me of that time I remember from my childhood, when my dad had a friend in a hospital, and would go on ranting about how that friend has much worse food and entertainment than a typical prisoner...

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.

If I was there I'd get a copy of all tutorials on 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!

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

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.

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-i...

> You can only have sex and play Monopoly so many times.

Speak for yourself! :D

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.

> four-dimensional with cards/rules that rewind/fastfoward/fork time

Or use a fourth spatial dimension, like a 4D Rubik's Cube or Miegakure.

4-dimensional Monopoly.

Reminds me of Continuum series. Is getting a seat in the Corporate Congress a victory or defeat condition?

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.

"right personality" I.E. boring, un-energetic people who have little sense of personal space.

Yes because when I read the biographies of the the latest round of astronaut trainee, it's a total snooze fest.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

> 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/

Plop Wikipedia, Netflix, a daily snapshot of news, social media, Reddit, etc. on one and you've probably got enough for most folks.

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.

> I believe it's not the entire library

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 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 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!

This is just like El Packete, aka a weekly dump of Internet content that's smuggled through to Cuba. Quick calculations:

- a typical flash drive would be 256GiB = 262144MiB = 268435456 kiB

- a week contains 7243600 = 604800s

=> A sustained connection of 450 kiB/s would be able to provide for the same kind of update as what people in Cuba do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719492

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.

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...

2: https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-habitat

> 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.

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.

They could write an operating system.

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.

The interplanetary net will probably look a lot like Usenet.

Not bad!

That sounds pretty great.

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://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."

Or you could use UUCP.

Usenet will make a comeback! Over interplanetary UUCP.

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.

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?

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.

Still, this would break parts of the internet. Some protocols between clients and servers simply depend on timing.

As a simple example, consider a websocket connection and a client that tries to reopen the connection whenever it hasn't received a ping from the server in the last X seconds.

You wouldn't speak those protocols. You'd run your whole web-browser on Earth, and then the Earth<->Mars connection would be a minimum-bandwidth delay-tolerant DOM-event synchronization protocol† to allow you to see what that web-browser is rendering, and tell it to go click things/type things. Essentially like a graphical thin-client protocol (X11 or RDP), but the primitives would be HTML/CSS elements and binary assets in their native formats, rather than native controls and assets in decompressed texture format.

† I believe the Chromecast already operates on some variant of such a protocol. It'd just need to be modified to expect events to come from both sides, rather than only from the "sender" device. (And to remove any/all timeouts and keep-alive pings, of course.)

...or, you could just use https://mosh.org to shell into any random server and run shell commands (including, say, w3m. But even things like IRC would work this way!)

Trying to interface with mainstream Internet, as it exists today, on an interplanetary ship won't work. Services people make these days expect constant bidirectional communication with relatively low latency (timeouting after mere seconds). On a mission like this, my first thought would not be Netflix, but Pirate Bay.

You mean "The most resilient torrent website in the Galaxy"? The TPB crew was ahead of the times.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!)

>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.

This is literally what IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) http://ipfs.io/ was created to solve.

Without knowing I would assume IPFS is built on TCP, wouldn't that be an issue?

It's built on a generic interface so other protocols could be used.

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.

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.

> 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?

I've seen point 2 covered before...https://xkcd.com/989/

It would certainly be a good alternative to suicide

This was the plot of Marooned in Realtime, an award-winning Vernor Vinge novel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime

I'm cynical about the present largely because I figure the future will be worse. Humanity is not going to face up to the ecological disaster we've caused, so our grandchildren (or our defrosted selves) will have to live with the droughts, famines and wars that result.

I've always wondered this too. Could we use Therapeutic Hypothermia (as it's called in the article) to increase our life spans? At least until more advanced medical procedures can cure aging?

> 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.

Invest money in stocks, bonds and the like and automatically reinvest dividends. Sleep for 10-20 years, wake up in a potentially better financial position.

(depending on maintenance costs for cryo sleep...)

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.

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?

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.

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_interes...

[1] https://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/7539/doctors-suspend-tra...

[2] https://www.americannursetoday.com/therapeutic-hypothermia-a...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_temperature_managemen...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_a...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation

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

Here's where that comes from: https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habita...

Looks like its from 2013

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-...

Nothing more recent than 2016 on their own website for "human stasis": http://spaceworkseng.com/tag/human-stasis/

Why is this news?

Somebody wanted it to be.

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.

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?

> At least they will probably have wifi.

These days it will be practical to include an enormous reading library.

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