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Comment by llm_trw | Hacker News Reader

This is assuming that you have to be conscious during the trip. Antimatter storage is a lot more scifi than human hibernation.

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I think the opposite is true.

We do know how to inefficiently create and store antimatter, we don’t have any idea how to cause human hibernation.

To me getting two dozen of orders of magnitude better at something is clearly hard, but that still beats trying to do something we don’t have a clue how to start. For human hibernation step 1 is probably serious genetic engineering and there’s going to be other steps.

Inefficiently in the context of antimatter storage makes every industrial accident since the dawn of time combined seem like a kid spilling their juice.

The inefficiencies around storage are a practical not a safety concern. Once cooled we can contain the particles just fine the issue is only 0.1% get trapped and the apparatus is vastly larger than the mass of antimatter stored.

To put that into number that people can understand, to accelerate 1kg of matter to 94% the speed of light you need 1kg of antimatter. That is the equivalent of the tsar bomb. So the storage facility would need to withstand that type of explosion 1000 times over for every kg of antimatter it produces.

World ending doesn't begin to describe what that looks like.

That assumes the energy is released in a fraction of a second which would preclude cooling the antimatter.

Do the same thing over a year in many different devices and you’re basically dealing with a normal nuclear power plant’s output.

I imagine you will want to send more than 1kg worth of payload.

I’d expect people would need a more efficient system, but it’s also the work of years and multiple sets of space based equipment working in parallel.

If you look at particle accelerators, the anti-matter storage is still very much experimental with anti-hydrogen storage holding it for less than 20s at most. We can trap individual particles (e.g. protons) for a long time but things get exponentially more complicated as you increase the size of the system.

Hell, we can't even store hydrogen without leakage issues and with anti-hydrogen any leakage is very bad.

We can freeze and reanimate living things only five or so orders of magnitude removed from humans; if we're just talking hibernation, it's as little as two.

How many orders of magnitude more complicated is a human mind than a cell? Infinity, I'd guess.

Everybody forgets about tardigrades, but they will be here when we are long passed from all memory.

Maybe, but there are mammals that can survive deep hibernation and near-total suspension. In pure biological/biochemical terms I don't see any reason to think we're much more than 100 times more complex than a rodent, or 1000 times more complex than the various fish and amphibian species who can survive their bodies reaching near-zero temperatures.

They've put pigs into suspended animation for an hour or two, I'm not sure what the upper bound is on that or how much further it's possible to go with it. Ditto organ deep-cooling. So while it's not feasible now, it feels like we need "only" 100x or so improvement to make it viable.

Unfortunately, it only takes one thing to make it not work.

The problem with human hibernation is that it is almost impossible to ethically test.

What medical ethics board is going to approve a research project "put healthy experimental subject in coma for 5 years, observe what they are like when they wake up?"

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sleep_therapy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelmsford_Royal_Commission

I think this is an example of a technology which, if it is ever developed, is most likely to be developed by some kind of totalitarian regime which has no ethical qualms about human experimentation.

That's not really how hibernation works in mammals, they have to raise their body temperature and come out of hibernation every couple weeks, the leading theory is this is to (ironically) catch up on sleep.

Inducing torpor would have major medical uses in surgical and emergency medicine, it's not just useful for passing the time.

Heinlein story time! Door into Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer Protagonist signs their life away for a 'cold sleep' that will allow them to wake up many years later. Tech is iffy. They do it because they are desperate, and the interest gained over time should make them rich (doesn't happen of course).

People with incurable diseases or just strange individuals can volunteer for such experiments. After that, if they write about their experiences, it could be featured first on Hacker News.

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