UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

John Bradford, president of SpaceWorks Enterprises, wants to talk about Mars, hibernation, and bears, which is tricky because — despite what grade school teachers sometimes claim — bears don’t hibernate. What bears do, perhaps better than any other species on Earth, is chill. Every winter, grizzlies crawl into their dens, bed down, and enter a state called torpor. Their internal temperatures drop by 10 degrees, their breathing slows with their heart rate, and their metabolic activity drops as they begin to cycle nitrogen that would otherwise be excreted in urine to prevent muscle atrophy. This feat of physiology is remarkable on its own, but the real reason spaceflight entrepreneurs are so interested in torpor is what would happen if you poked a resting bear: It would wake up and eat you.

Torpor isn’t deep sleep. It is sometimes considered a type of hibernation, and the two are similar. In both cases metabolic activity slows, although true hibernation is more extreme — some animals can reach near-freezing internal temperatures and thaw out just fine. It’s the closest thing the natural world has to suspended animation, a way to avoid the negative physical and mental effects of time in space by leveraging a mammalian superpower — one humans might, on some level, possess.

“We still really don’t understand a lot of the triggers and mechanisms for even why some animals do it,” says Bradford, who has enlisted the help of biologists working on these very questions. His thinking? If we can get a handle on how our mammal cousins shut down without suffering long-term ill effects, we might be able to replicate those results in ourselves.

“I’m very encouraged,” he adds.

Here’s what he imagines: Astronauts entering pods, slowly losing consciousness, and letting their internal temperatures drop as engines fire up and blast away. Six months later, these unconscious explorers wake up on Mars without recollection of the journey.

NASA buys into this vision, which sounds science fictional, but might become a key component of the plan to get humans to the Red Planet this century. Spaceworks is now in the second phase of a NASA-funded project to research the feasibility of inducing torpor in Mars-bound astronauts in order to keep them healthy and save money.

Human hibernation stasis suspended animation

A SpaceWorks design concept for a Mars-bound spacecraft.

As it turns out, the strongest argument in favor spaceflight hibernation is economic. Bradford estimates that a torpor habitat and launch system would weigh half as much as a traditional living space loaded up with food and oxygen tanks. Shipping costs to Mars work out to about $50,000 a pound, so when you’re talking savings in the realm of hundreds of tons, even a very large investment in research and design could pay off.

Plus, torpor might offer protections against bone density loss, muscle atrophy, and possibly even space radiation for astronauts on the long haul. “They’re still looking for good solutions to address those, and consequently you end up with multiple technology paths trying to solve each one of these individually, and we think we can with this one technology offer some benefits to all of those,” says Bradford.

From a medical perspective, it’s unclear at this point whether stasis would in itself protect against cellular damage from radiation, but from an engineering perspective, it’s a lot easier to implement shielding if astronauts are contained to a capsule.

Which all brings the question back around to feasibility. Humans do not typically hibernate, but many mammals do, and there are reasons to believe that we have our biology can be hacked to create a similar response. The best evidence is in rare and extraordinary cases where people have been found apparently frozen to death, only to come back to life once they warm up. As biochemist Mark Roth memorably put it in a 2010 TED Talk: “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.”

In 1999, Anna Bågenholm spent 80 minutes trapped under a frozen waterfall in Norway, and her internal temperature dropped to 57 degrees. Her heart was stopped for three hours, and yet thanks to a careful medical resuscitation, she came back to life and recovered almost completely.

In 2006, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi of Japan got lost in the forest and was found 24 days later in a hibernation-like state. His body temperature was just 72 degrees, and he had no recollection past the second day of his absence. He also recovered.

These days, Roth is working to develop a chemical way to induce hibernation or suspended animation in humans as an aid for emergency medical treatment. If you put someone in stasis right after a heart attack, stroke, or traumatic injury, his thinking goes, you can essentially stop the clock, giving doctors time to fix the problem while preventing the damage to the brain and other organs that would otherwise result from oxygen deprivation.

Hydrogen sulfide seems to have some promise as an inducer of suspended animation. The compound binds to oxygen receptors, which decreases the body’s demand for O2 and causes metabolism to shut down. The clinical trials were canceled, but Roth hasn’t given up on similar compounds that could help minimize injury from blood rushing back into tissues after a medical procedure.

SpaceWorks Enterprises torpor Mars habitat.

Crew members would be fed nutrients intravenously through the flight.

Still, most of the medical research into human stasis is focused on finding ways to safely slow human metabolism for a period of a few hours to a few weeks. To get to Mars, that timeline will have to be expanded significantly, although that work will certainly provide crucial insights that will guide the future of space hibernation. And in order to accomplish that there will need to be human trails, which, again, gets tricky.

“Other than space flight, there isn’t really a compelling reason to do this to a healthy person,” says Bradford.

Even though Leroy Chiao, former NASA astronaut and commander of the International Space Station, is cheerleading for the project, not all astronauts are pumped to go under either. “At one of our technical conferences Buzz Aldrin voiced concerns,” says Bradford. “He didn’t want to do it. He wants to be awake.”

Bradford understood where the NASA vet was coming from, but he has a slightly more pragmatic perspective.

“If it means the difference between being able to go to Mars, and not,” says Bradford, “I think everybody will do it.”

Photos via SpaceWorks Enterprises, Inc. (1, 2), SpaceWorks Enterprises, Inc. (SEI)

Producers pulled all the stops in the highly anticipated miniseries Mars, debuting Monday night on the National Geographic Channel. The $20 million, six-part television event pulled together an A-list team from the worlds of Hollywood and the scientific community: We’re talking about Oscar-winning producers Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Justin Wilkes sitting in the same room and talking about Mars with people like science writer Stephen Petranek, astronaut Mae Jemison, aeronautics engineer Bobby Braun, and many others.

The producers blend science fiction with reality to portray what a crewed mission to Mars will look like in the near-future mixed with real-world commentary and interviews from today’s leading space and engineering experts.

And in the interest of providing people with something that can still qualify as “entertainment,” Mars does not shy away from taking dramatic liberties that come at the price of scientific accuracy, interspersing a fake crewed mission with real-world commentary from leading engineers.

Two Inverse writers — Kastalia Medrano and Neel Patel — watched an advance screening of the first Mars episode. Warning: There are some spoilers.

NP: When I first heard about the concept for Mars, I was admittedly very skeptical about how this would turn out. Talking about traveling to Mars through a narrative of fiction almost never goes well. But I thought the first episode actually did a good job to bring to attention the types of obstacles and issues that are big for NASA, SpaceX, and other companies looking to get to the Red Planet — like the lack of Martian atmosphere that makes the descent to the planet such a dangerous move.

KM: It’s an interesting concept, treating the 2016 “flashbacks” as non-fiction, using cameos with the biggest names in the real-life journey to Mars like Elon Musk. I hope that they keep that balance with the rest of the episodes, because the future they’ve extrapolated can get a bit cheesy. I think in order to be successful as an academic tool and not just a source of entertainment, the series will have to be a little more economical with the “dramatic liberties,” as you put it.

Which isn’t to say the show by definition needs to be drier — Mars is cool! The reason the journey to Mars has captivated so many people is that the science is legit dramatic and high-risk, high-reward on its own terms, so I hope they can tap into that instead of just sensationalizing. One of the real-life challenges they touched on was the immense stress and degradation the astronauts’ bodies will face — but it was kind of just thrown in as an ominous bullet point to beef up a speech and make everything seem more dire while also making the characters seem more heroic. Granted, it was just the first episode, but I’d really like to see them work in some scientifically valid takes — not just on the more well-known narratives like loss of bone density, but on things like the challenges of organ regeneration in space, and how to cope in a vacuum without incoming medical resources. For instance, how do you hope they’ll handle the radiation issue?

NP: As you know, I’ve been harping on space radiation being the single biggest obstacle keeping us from sending people to Mars. It’s an issue that not even Elon Musk will fully address — and he and SpaceX are targeting to send the first humans to Mars by 2024 or 2025. How they’re going to keep those kinds of radiation levels from decimating the body is still a complete mystery. And it’s not just about the trip to Mars. Astronauts will need to be protected from the sun’s rays while they live and work on the Red Planet. If the goal is to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, it needs to be with the idea that we can live healthily and happily on the planet.

Speaking of health, that’s another issue I had with the premiere. The crew commander for the mission gets injured, but works to keep the extent of his injuries a secret from the rest of the crew and from ground control. Not only does this seem impossible — I would imagine the first astronauts to head to Mars would be completely wrapped in medical devices that measured vitals constantly — but it’s also impractical. Would an astronaut really work to keep problems with his/her health hidden from his team? Almost certainly not. Punting those problems down the road poses an enormous risk to the rest of the and forces them to potentially deal with much worse later on. I get putting forth something like this for the purposes of drama and suspense, but this does a disservice to astronauts as a whole and makes it seem the mental and physical prowess of those men and women are matched by a cavalier attitude.

KM: I felt the same way about the scene where they essentially begin hiking across Mars. I dunno what kind of rad spacesuits we’ll be working with in 2033, so I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it came off a bit cavalier. I did, however, appreciate the fact that they made it pretty clear that, whether or not the mission was successful, the team wasn’t really expecting to come back. The first generation of Mars colonists won’t be travelers who live there a few years and then go back and forth — when they leave Earth, they’ll need to do it with the understanding that they’re never coming back, since, even if they all survive, the distance and resources inherent to the whole thing makes a return journey just not feasible. So I was glad to not see a romanticized We’ll see you in X years!narrative, though of course the idea of leaving Earth never to return isn’t exactly lacking in drama either.

This probably won’t happen because it’s not the most scientific or animated thread in the plot, but I’d actually be interested in getting a bit more context about how the future supposedly arrived at the entity they call the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF). Utopian organizations that have united all available civilizations are a pretty common optimistic sci-fi trope (see: Star Trek), but as of 2016, we already have the seeds of global cooperation — Russians and Americans coordinating on the International Space Station (well, sort of), new space laws meant to foster inter-country collaboration, private spaceflight companies working in tandem with NASA, and so on. I’d like to see them connect those dots to their 2033 timeline.

NP: For sure. I actually loved how they spent a bit of time explaining what SpaceX is currently doing by bringing rocket boosters back to Earth for a safe landing after a launch , and explaining why reusability is such an important part of making future space travel work.

It was especially clever how they let the footage of the June 2015 SpaceX explosion unfold — making it very clear that we have a long ways to go before we fully figure out how all of this is going to go.

Mars is fascinating, and it arrives at a time when the prospect of humans going to the Red Planet has transcended the realm of possibility to inevitability. I think the real thing will possess fewer histrionics, but will be no less an achievement of staggering proportions.

Photos via National Geographic

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