The Hibernators Guide to the Galaxy | Hacker News Reader

The Hibernators Guide to the Galaxy

wired.com

43 pointspratap10319 comments

"So he mustered the courage to creep into the sleeping bears' dens and stick thermometers in their rectums, a gambit that allowed him to assess just how much their internal temperature declined during their annual torpor."

That sentence right there is worth the read...

https://archive.ph/5Tfkd

An interesting read..

On another note, I'm sure my other half is a bear, or at least a genetic anomaly. She can somehow sleep 16 hours a day for days on end.

My wife did that in her early thirties just before her MS diagnosis.

Not to be alarmist but unless you are exaggerating, no mentally or physically healthy human being needs that much sleep.

I wasnt kidding about the duration but other than this anomaly, she is otherwise normal/healthy.

That said, thanks for pointing it out - it didnt occur to me that it could be a symptom of something.

As someone that spends almost no time thinking about hibernation, this was a pretty interesting read! On the problem of weight needed to sustain a crew to and from Mars, could we not setup something like a network of stations for the sole purpose of resupplying ships on long journeys? A moon base seems like it would be a good start as well.

who supplies these stations?

autonomous droid ships like the SpaceX capsule resupplying the ISS. You just modify the capsule so the hatch is the size of the container(s) inside like a cargo plane. The capsule docks, containers unload, capsule detaches and heads home. Next human ship docks, loads containers, detaches, continues mission.

seems simple enough

Except that seems risky as hell. Much better to have everything aboard ahead of time instead of hoping everything goes right with a en-route logistics chain.

I guess there will be plenty of takers to be the who, but the how is more of the engineering bit. I am guessing if interplanetary travel does become a thing, some kind of open space network will need to be present to facilitate travel.

You would have to decelerate and then accelerate to dock with each station. It would take more fuel then it would save by a lot. Edit: Alternatively you could accelerate the fuel, but it wouldn't be any better. You also have to worry about getting these stations in orbits that would be useful for the trip. Considering the Earth, Mars, and the stations would all have different orbital velocities around the sun, this wouldn't be an easy task.

> On the problem of weight needed to sustain a crew

They say 4 people need 11 tons of food for a 1100 day mission. That’s 2.5 kg per person per day. It looks like this includes water. Water can (and is) recycled in space missions. A lot of food in space is dehydrated (you can buy astronaut ice cream at any science museum, and it’s not that bad). You may get away with only 0.5 kg of solid food per person per day.

If they did the same type of generous estimates elsewhere, then maybe 100 tons would suffice, instead of 300. And 100 tons is how much the Statship is supposed to be able to carry.

i'm re-reading Three Body Problem, (well, Deaths End, book three of the the trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past) and hibernation plays a major role in story. if given a chance and no more personal attachments to my current time, i would seriously consider hibernation for a pretty long period.

I hope we see some hibernation breakthroughs in the coming years, but I think that (unfortunately) our species is going to remain “grounded” if we don’t develop Faster Than Light (FTL) travel capabilities.

I’ve been thinking that FTL might just be truly impossible which is why we don’t see ETs showing up. I know that there are theoretical designs for FTL systems, but so far the details of implementation remain elusive and the energy requirements are enormous… so, could be impossible.

Beyond that, I think humans may eventually colonize the moon, Mars, and the clouds of Venus, but I highly doubt we will make it out of the Solar System before our species dies out.

Edit: I hope to be wrong.

I think we should be working out how to modify/terraform the atmosphere of Venus so we can live on the surface. At the rate we're going, we're going to need that tech on Earth. So once it's perfected here, we can then get our sister planet back to functional too

Venus needs a lot of work that Mars doesn’t. I think the main problem is the rotation period. The amount of energy required to speed up the day of planet is unthinkable.

I came away thinking that it was impractical even in the long term after watching this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI

which is scary in that also probably means we have no way of recovering Earth from what we continue to do to it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com