Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey there, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your mind. This is Julie Douglas and I am vibrating
Speaker 1: the stereo celia in your ear. Robert is out this
Speaker 1: week with his son who has undergone surgery and is
Speaker 1: doing well and recuperating. So we decided to rerun one
Speaker 1: of our favorite topics, hibernation and suspended animation. Now, whether
Speaker 1: this is the Winter of your discontent and you'd like
Speaker 1: to look into the possibility of human hibernation, or you're
Speaker 1: planning on entering into a state of torpor for future
Speaker 1: travel to Mars, this is your podcast episode. Hope you enjoy. Julie,
Speaker 1: we are both warm blooded creatures, and as we know,
Speaker 1: warm warm bloodedness comes with a certain price. It's a
Speaker 1: high level of energy consumption. So what do we what
Speaker 1: do we do if we don't have energy to consume
Speaker 1: to feed our body? Well take it down, yeah? Or
Speaker 1: or will we die? That's all possibility. The idea behind
Speaker 1: hibernation itself is that you have to cut the cost.
Speaker 1: You have to spiral down, like like a business that
Speaker 1: tested the lay off a bunch of people and close
Speaker 1: one of its stores to survive a recession. Or the
Speaker 1: example that always comes to my mind when I was
Speaker 1: younger and I was living in Tennessee, I found myself
Speaker 1: in a car a lot and I would often listen
Speaker 1: to I think the guy's name was Dave Ramsey, who
Speaker 1: is this kind of like local locally here in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: we have Clark Howard, who's like the the economic guru
Speaker 1: that tells you how to get out of credit and
Speaker 1: how to fine tune your financial situation. He's wonderful, by
Speaker 1: the way. Yeah, yeah, he is Clark how It's wonderful.
Speaker 1: But I remember listening to the Dave Ramsey Show at
Speaker 1: this point, and he was always advising people on how
Speaker 1: to get out of credit card debt. And he would say,
Speaker 1: all right, you're just gonna eat rice and beans for
Speaker 1: a year, so you can do. You can eat rice
Speaker 1: and beans and cancel cable. And that is kind of
Speaker 1: what hibernation is about. Are personally, Yeah, it's it's about
Speaker 1: cutting down that the energy consumption, cutting down the level
Speaker 1: of life that is being lived by the organism so
Speaker 1: that it can survive conditions that would otherwise be legal. Well,
Speaker 1: and I've actually read before too that there are certain
Speaker 1: places in the world before the advent of electricity and
Speaker 1: so on technology that say you were in Siberia, winter
Speaker 1: comes and a family of five probably will have a
Speaker 1: sort of hibernation period. Of course, they're going to have
Speaker 1: food available to them that they've stalked away, but there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of reason to go outside for months.
Speaker 1: And it always reminds me of the Charlie and Chocolate
Speaker 1: Factory movie where you see the family, the entire family
Speaker 1: in the bed because you know, they're all trying to
Speaker 1: keep warm it's winter, they're trying to conserve resources. So
Speaker 1: this idea of hibernation, at least in humans. Yes, we
Speaker 1: we don't completely close down our heartbeat, or I'm sure
Speaker 1: those people didn't back in the day in Siberia, but
Speaker 1: there's a version of it in which we have tried
Speaker 1: to batten down the hatches when it comes to energy consumption.
Speaker 1: It sounds like it's a great opportunity for board games
Speaker 1: and families of board games. Maybe that's why they have
Speaker 1: far better board games in Europe and all the great
Speaker 1: board games come out of Europe. I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, you would think like Siberia would
Speaker 1: would well no when they're well no, no, but but literally,
Speaker 1: let's talk about these animals who do it right, who
Speaker 1: do it straight up right. One of the most important
Speaker 1: things to realize is that hypernation is not sleep. In fact,
Speaker 1: according to zoo physiologist Brian Barnes, it's kind of the
Speaker 1: opposite of sleep. He argues that instead of a blissful slumber,
Speaker 1: because let's face it, sleep is pretty much the best,
Speaker 1: right if you can, if you can actually achieve it
Speaker 1: and you don't have any issues getting there, you're not
Speaker 1: plagued by nightmares in which dogs all your face then,
Speaker 1: or you're you're back in college and you didn't know
Speaker 1: you had an exam. You thought you'd canceled the class
Speaker 1: all that. If you can actually achieve good old sleep,
Speaker 1: it's the best. It's like being in Nisconsin, a cozy,
Speaker 1: warm cloud, right. So the idea of like this winter sucks,
Speaker 1: be nice if I could just sleep through and wake
Speaker 1: up when it's warm or whole. I really don't want
Speaker 1: to travel all the way across country. It wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be great if I could just go to sleep and
Speaker 1: wake up and be there. But Barnes argues that it's
Speaker 1: not like this so hibernating squirrels, for example, would be
Speaker 1: stuck in something that would be more like months of insomnia,
Speaker 1: so it would feel like long stretches, he says, of
Speaker 1: icy stupor punctuated by short, costly naps. Like. The idea
Speaker 1: here is that their energy level is down, their metabolism
Speaker 1: is down. Everything is taken down to the level to
Speaker 1: where sleep isn't even possible. They have to power things
Speaker 1: up a bit to actually sleep. They have to start
Speaker 1: turning on the lights in the abandoned wings of the
Speaker 1: hotel just to get to that level where that the
Speaker 1: animal can rest well, isn't there. I believe I read
Speaker 1: something to you about um after bears come out of
Speaker 1: hibernation that there's a very long period where they have
Speaker 1: a sort of sleep hangover, and they it's almost like
Speaker 1: sleep deprivation, same thing, right, like, you're not you're not
Speaker 1: necessarily having a nice, big, cozy sleep. You're kind of
Speaker 1: coming out of the fog and re entering yet another fog.
Speaker 1: And it cost energy to come out of that. The
Speaker 1: ground squirrels, for example, they undergo cyclical rewarmings during this
Speaker 1: hibernation process, and it costs more than the squirrels stored
Speaker 1: body fat to do that, of course, worth noting, even
Speaker 1: though we're talking mostly about warm blooded animals, and indeed
Speaker 1: we are warm blooded animals. Hibernation also occurs in reptiles,
Speaker 1: cold blood creatures, where it's called brumation. It differs from
Speaker 1: the mammalian hibernation because reptiles, again are cold blooded. They
Speaker 1: can't control their own body temperature, so they need to
Speaker 1: spend the winter in a place where they'll stay reasonably warm.
Speaker 1: It's not always a situation of something surviving cold temperatures.
Speaker 1: There's also something called estivation, and this is where an
Speaker 1: animal enters a hibernation like state during the summer, often
Speaker 1: in situations where there's less available water and moisture. Yeah right,
Speaker 1: because conditions become really hot and dry. So that's in
Speaker 1: addition to maybe your food supply dwindling in that area
Speaker 1: as well. But for the most part, hibernation, and as
Speaker 1: we understand it is considered a torporse state. That's basically
Speaker 1: an umbrella term to describe all the various types of
Speaker 1: temperature and metabolism reducing functions that are involved in hibernation. Yep,
Speaker 1: that's right. So think about torpor in terms of oxygen consumption,
Speaker 1: which can fall as low as one percent of resting
Speaker 1: metabolic rate, and core body temperatures to near or below
Speaker 1: freezing temperatures. Heart rate drops who as little as two
Speaker 1: point five percent of its usual level of Chipmunk's heart
Speaker 1: rate flows to five beats per minute from the usual
Speaker 1: two hundreds. Like you said, breathing rate drops by fifty
Speaker 1: to a hundred percent, which is just crazy. So you know,
Speaker 1: you have reptiles out there that goes hibernation period without breathing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then in many cases we're also talking to about,
Speaker 1: consciousness is greatly diminished. So even though this for instances
Speaker 1: squirrel is in this weird and insomnia state, uh, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's just completely conscious either, so which I
Speaker 1: don't think necessarily sweetens the deal. It's kind of this
Speaker 1: uncomfortable semi conscious state, which is a far from the
Speaker 1: oh I'm going to have a long winner snap and
Speaker 1: wake up. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it does kind of
Speaker 1: feel like, oh man, I am trapped in this body
Speaker 1: and I don't get any of the great benefits here.
Speaker 1: Of course, you know we're from fising a little bit here.
Speaker 1: Another thing that's happening is the body fat, which we
Speaker 1: know is packed with energy, is burned off to provide
Speaker 1: energy that an animal needs to maintain levels of body functions,
Speaker 1: and this can be really efficient. Then again, we've got
Speaker 1: our Arctic ground squirrels and they live entirely off a
Speaker 1: stored body fat for as long as it nine months.
Speaker 1: So you have glands in the body that are altering
Speaker 1: the amounts of hormones that are released to control just
Speaker 1: about every physiological aspect of hibernation. And and when a
Speaker 1: mammal warm blooded animal inters hibernation, it's essentially becoming like
Speaker 1: a cold blooded animal. It cranks down the temperature, but
Speaker 1: it has a set point in mind, and you can
Speaker 1: think of this like a setting on your thermostatic Right,
Speaker 1: let's say you're cutting energy consumption during the winter. You're
Speaker 1: only willing to the house gets so cold because if
Speaker 1: you know, if it gets colder than this set point,
Speaker 1: it's going to start getting uncomfortable and and you'd rather
Speaker 1: not not live that way. So in this case, there's
Speaker 1: a set point because if things get much lower, the
Speaker 1: creature may not be able to live. So the set
Speaker 1: point will be there and is things that get colder
Speaker 1: if it starts to drop below that set point, then
Speaker 1: the energy will crank up. It will use some of
Speaker 1: those fat reserves to keep it at a tolerable level. Right,
Speaker 1: So each animal has its own little thermostat essentially. And
Speaker 1: you're probably wondering what about defecation. I was wondering that, yes, yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: no fecal matter is produced because nothing is passing through
Speaker 1: the digest Shut that wing of the operation down. That's right,
Speaker 1: talking too much money, using too much energy. We haven't
Speaker 1: got it. Shut it down. No pooping, no pooping. But
Speaker 1: the body is always producing urea, which we know is
Speaker 1: a waste by product of urine and hibernating animals, bodies
Speaker 1: are able to recycle the urea. Whoa, So that's that's
Speaker 1: pretty cool, right, because yeah, I mean have you ever
Speaker 1: like in the middle of nights, man, I really don't
Speaker 1: want to get up and get at bath room, and
Speaker 1: that would be a good feature. I wish I could
Speaker 1: just I mean, you know, we do you actually try either, Like,
Speaker 1: let me just try and focus and recycle my urine.
Speaker 1: I do idea trying to lucid dream it. Bears don't
Speaker 1: urinate at all in the winter, but they break the
Speaker 1: urea down into amino acids. And even though they don't
Speaker 1: drink any water, they don't get dehydrated either. They're able
Speaker 1: to extract enough water from their own body fat to
Speaker 1: stay hydrated. And here's another really cool thing. This is
Speaker 1: specific to black bears. They have a unique feature and
Speaker 1: that they actually continue to reform bones by keeping their
Speaker 1: calcium levels calibrated in their blood levels. And researchers believe
Speaker 1: that it's the secretion of a hormone called a paraphor
Speaker 1: morn and that's the reason why the calcium is recycled.
Speaker 1: And there are a bunch of clinical trials in which
Speaker 1: they are using the human version of that hormone and
Speaker 1: giving it to patients with osteoporosis. So that's that's something
Speaker 1: that they're trying to crack there with those black bears,
Speaker 1: Like whine the world would they be actually for ring
Speaker 1: new bone while they are hibernating. They're not ating or anything, right, right,
Speaker 1: I mean think about ourselves. I think if we've ever
Speaker 1: been waylaid by something and you're in the hospital for
Speaker 1: two weeks with a cast on, your body loses bone
Speaker 1: in calcium. So yeah, just from that little bit of atrophy,
Speaker 1: you have other species that basically enter this toper state
Speaker 1: on a daily basis, which is always amazing. Hummingbirds, for example,
Speaker 1: like hummingbirds are are huge energy users. Who discussed before,
Speaker 1: I think just just how much energy a hummingbird uses,
Speaker 1: and that's why flapping wings are really not that that
Speaker 1: economic of a system. But nature cannot make a propeller,
Speaker 1: so it's stuck with flapping wings. Yeah, the heartbeats, but
Speaker 1: it's per seconds. Yeah, it's crazy. It's in saying because
Speaker 1: they have the use an immense amount of energy, and
Speaker 1: if they can't get the energy they need on a
Speaker 1: daily basis, they will just shut it down every day
Speaker 1: for a little bit. So they'll shut things down like
Speaker 1: temperature will drop in a hummingbird on a regular basis,
Speaker 1: just to maintain Think of it as a business as
Speaker 1: an energy consumption has become more of an issue. You
Speaker 1: have various buildings that will say on weekends only have
Speaker 1: a certain portion of the office that is air conditioned,
Speaker 1: and if you're coming into work on the weekends, you
Speaker 1: need to relocate to a certain portion of the building
Speaker 1: every day. Even it's saying all right, well during this time,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to shut it down a little because
Speaker 1: we cannot maintain the energy costs involved in keeping this
Speaker 1: level of consumption up minute to minute. But that is
Speaker 1: an incredible ability to have. And you know is joking
Speaker 1: saying that we're morphizing this, but we can't help it.
Speaker 1: To project our own ideas onto this and say could
Speaker 1: could we actually harness this for ourselves? And we're gonna
Speaker 1: take a quick break and when we get back, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about this possibility of humans hibernating. All right, we're back,
Speaker 1: So human hibernation. There are two huge areas where we
Speaker 1: could use this. One, of course, is space travel, because
Speaker 1: space is huge, takes a long time to get anywhere.
Speaker 1: With our current understanding of how physics work and how
Speaker 1: space propulsion can work, they're very shortcuts in mind. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, we're looking at long travels, travels
Speaker 1: in most cases that are longer than the span of
Speaker 1: human lifetime. So is there a way to suspend animation?
Speaker 1: Is there a way to shut things down and preserve
Speaker 1: human life across these vast distances, Because again, it's not
Speaker 1: only a situation of like, oh, I don't want to
Speaker 1: sit there and play take that toes for you know,
Speaker 1: the length of a journey. Again, hopefully they would have
Speaker 1: some quality European board games aboard that space ship. But uh,
Speaker 1: but then also, do we have the energy required and
Speaker 1: the resources to keep people engaged in an everyday level
Speaker 1: of activity in life over the course of a long voyage.
Speaker 1: Cheaper better to turn them into low energy cargo for
Speaker 1: that duration. The other huge area, of course is healthcare.
Speaker 1: All right, so we have somebody who has a disease
Speaker 1: that cannot yet be cured or an injury that needs
Speaker 1: to be addressed. Say someone's injured out in the middle
Speaker 1: of no Are and you need to get them to
Speaker 1: a quality medical facility, and it's going to be a
Speaker 1: day's journey or more. You need to put them in
Speaker 1: a hibernated state, and potentially you could take this low
Speaker 1: energy cargo move it to the facility where they can
Speaker 1: actually treat the injury and take care of things there.
Speaker 1: Another example is, say someone suffered oxygen starvation to the
Speaker 1: brain through a stroke or heart attack. They could actually
Speaker 1: be put into the suspended animation and lower their oxygen
Speaker 1: to man and prevent brain damage. Right time is of
Speaker 1: the essence and in these situations, so if you could
Speaker 1: shut things down and sort of contain the situation just
Speaker 1: long enough to get in there and do something about it,
Speaker 1: and that would be huge. So it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where one of the ideas is very far reaching
Speaker 1: and super future of mankind and our most cosmic visions,
Speaker 1: and the other is every day people having strokes every
Speaker 1: day and then what could we do to mitigate that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and at the crux of this is our metabolic right, right,
Speaker 1: our basimonomolic right, which is pretty standard in humans. We
Speaker 1: don't have these tip offs in our circadian rhythms to say, hey,
Speaker 1: guess what, we're taking it down to the steps today,
Speaker 1: go in your cave. Um. We're pretty regular when it
Speaker 1: comes serve as a basal metabolic rate unless you're like
Speaker 1: a super yogi, right, and you can you can tinker
Speaker 1: with it a bit. You could do some parlor tricks
Speaker 1: and opportun you're dead for eighteen hours or something would
Speaker 1: in fact you were not, but you had again taken
Speaker 1: down your breathing and your heart rate. Okay, so beyond
Speaker 1: the Yogi, what are we thinking about here? Well, they're
Speaker 1: basically looking at ways to either use temperature or chemicals
Speaker 1: to force a hybernative state on human beings and we
Speaker 1: are certainly not there yet but that but a number
Speaker 1: of experiments have been conducted. Mostly these are involving animals,
Speaker 1: and we're looking at ways, all right, can we take animals,
Speaker 1: either hibernating animals or non hybernating animals, tinker with them
Speaker 1: either with temperature or chemicals and force a Hybernative State
Speaker 1: biologist at the Institute of Arctic Biology and Fairbanks, Alaska
Speaker 1: are particularly interested in this. They do a lot of
Speaker 1: inquiries into how Arctic ground squirrels behave and hibernate. They
Speaker 1: point out that Arctic ground squirrels, like us, like all animals,
Speaker 1: produce a molecule called a denazine which slows nerve cell activities.
Speaker 1: So when a squirrel begins to hibernate, even when you
Speaker 1: or I feel drowsy, right, that's what it is. That's
Speaker 1: what's going on. So they devised a number of experiments
Speaker 1: where they took non hibernating Arctic ground squirrels and they
Speaker 1: gave them a substance that stimulated a denazine receptors in
Speaker 1: the brain. And then they also gave a substance similar
Speaker 1: to caffeine to arouse other squirrels. And I mean to
Speaker 1: rouse them from there, not to yeah, not to arouse
Speaker 1: them sexually. So in the same way that a denazine
Speaker 1: is involved in that drowsy feeling you're getting, we're also
Speaker 1: counteracting it when we run for that cup of coffee
Speaker 1: or that discussing energy. That's right, I mean that splits
Speaker 1: the binding point, right. It basically says, I guess what
Speaker 1: you're not going to bind here, I'm caffeine. I'm waking
Speaker 1: this person back up, which I thought was fascinating. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know, obviously, we know that caffeine perks us up,
Speaker 1: but to know that it works that specifically, and these experiments,
Speaker 1: they were able to activate a denizine receptors in sufficient
Speaker 1: enough manner to induce this hibernative state in these Arctic
Speaker 1: ground squirrels during our hibernation season. The small experiment in
Speaker 1: some senses, you know, they're not certainly it's not the
Speaker 1: same as say, oh, we put a human into hibernative state.
Speaker 1: In this case, we took the ground squirrel and we
Speaker 1: were able to induce hibernation. And it's actually read a
Speaker 1: big I mean, it's one of the steps that could
Speaker 1: conceivably lead us to being able to create this effect.
Speaker 1: In humans. Right. Another really good example is I keep
Speaker 1: thinking of it as pet cemetery. I have to say
Speaker 1: the zombie dogs. Yes, this is from the Safar Center
Speaker 1: for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh. They put
Speaker 1: dogs in a state of suspended animation by flushing out
Speaker 1: their bodies of blood, taking out their bood and replacing
Speaker 1: it with forty five degree fahrenheit saline solution that contained
Speaker 1: oxygen and glucose. The dogs went into cardiac arrest and
Speaker 1: they clinically died right after three hours. The team withdrew
Speaker 1: the solution so they were verse this process. They reintroduced
Speaker 1: the blood and then applied to gentle electric shock and
Speaker 1: while the dogs were raised from the dead. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was a similar experiment that was conducted by surgeon at
Speaker 1: the Messagusetts General Hospital in Boston, Like I'm in the
Speaker 1: name of Hassan Alam, and he tested the technique about
Speaker 1: two times on pigs with a success rate, and it
Speaker 1: basically involved putting the animal under draining out some blood.
Speaker 1: In this case, he used cuts and major veins to
Speaker 1: stimulate the multiple gunshot wounds, so he was he was
Speaker 1: trying to create the situation of fatal or life threatening injury.
Speaker 1: And then as the pig rapidly loses about half its
Speaker 1: blood and there's a state of shock, Dr Alam would
Speaker 1: drain the blood store it before pumping this chilled organ
Speaker 1: preservation fluid into its system. Then the animal's temperature falls
Speaker 1: to about kindegrees celsius until it injures this state of
Speaker 1: profound hypothermia. And then later they were able to put
Speaker 1: the blood back in and restore the pig to life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again it's not about terrorizing dogs and pigs. It's
Speaker 1: about trying to create these trauma situations that might happen
Speaker 1: in a hospital and giving doctors an alternative in terms
Speaker 1: of trying to extend the life period and be able
Speaker 1: to take out all the tools in the arsenal to
Speaker 1: help that person. And it speaking about thermia, it just
Speaker 1: made me think about cell biologist Mark Roth. He has
Speaker 1: a great ted talk about this about suspended animation. He
Speaker 1: may be the furthest along I think in trauma medicine
Speaker 1: in terms of looking at ways that we can play
Speaker 1: with hibernation. He was inspired by a skier in Norway
Speaker 1: who was trapped in an icy waterfall for two hours
Speaker 1: before she was extracted. She had no heartbeat, and she
Speaker 1: was thought to be frozen dead. Seven hours later, still
Speaker 1: without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life and
Speaker 1: she went on to be the head and radiologist at
Speaker 1: that hospital. Later on. Roth was always amazed by this,
Speaker 1: and he wondered, if there's some agent in our bodies
Speaker 1: that we make ourselves, that we might be able to
Speaker 1: regulate our own metabolic rate. Okay, So he was like,
Speaker 1: is there some sort of flexibility here that we don't
Speaker 1: know about that the skier unwittingly tapped into. And normally
Speaker 1: you would say this would be a fool's erranty even
Speaker 1: try to mess with our metabolic rate in this way,
Speaker 1: but he just kept picking up the problem, picking up
Speaker 1: the problem. And he was watching like Nova or something
Speaker 1: one night and they were talking about hydrogen sulfide and
Speaker 1: he had that kind of dinging moment where he's like, yes,
Speaker 1: that's the thing in our body that we actually do produce,
Speaker 1: albeit in small amounts. And he started to think, could
Speaker 1: it cause oxygen to not bind like a kind of
Speaker 1: game of musical chairs, leading to uh to not consume
Speaker 1: that oxygen and then by reducing our demand for oxygen.
Speaker 1: So he decides to start administering hydrogen sulfide to mice
Speaker 1: and then again put it in the cold environment because
Speaker 1: he thinks that there's something key to this coold environment
Speaker 1: that happened with the skier. And indeed, then Mike started
Speaker 1: stopped moving up here to dead, oxygen consumption rate fell
Speaker 1: by tenfold. So this again, this is really important, right
Speaker 1: because we don't have brains to starve from lack of oxygen.
Speaker 1: But he says, this is the real kicker, that hydrogen
Speaker 1: sulfide is rapidly metabolized. So if you were dosed with
Speaker 1: us after six hours of d animation, all you would
Speaker 1: have to do is be put out into room air
Speaker 1: and warm up, and you would be, in his words,
Speaker 1: none the worse for wear. So and one model of
Speaker 1: heart attack animals were given the hydrogen sulfide and they
Speaker 1: showed a seventy percent reduction and heart damage compared to
Speaker 1: those who got the standard of care that you and
Speaker 1: I were to receive if we were to have a
Speaker 1: heart attack here today. And the same is true for
Speaker 1: organ failures. So when you have a loss of function
Speaker 1: by going to pour profusion of kidney or liver, you
Speaker 1: have damage that suffered. So in he started human trials,
Speaker 1: and he says that we're on the path of really
Speaker 1: understanding this metabolic flexibility, and the not too distant future
Speaker 1: we could have E m T s actually giving people
Speaker 1: this hydrogen sulfide and extending the their lives possibly. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, if you were in an emergency situation, you're
Speaker 1: being transported, you might be able to be put under
Speaker 1: in the suspended animation and not have any ill effects
Speaker 1: to your tissue. Well, that one of the take homes
Speaker 1: here for me is that suspended animation induced human hibernation.
Speaker 1: It may look easy in some of our sci fi visions,
Speaker 1: many of our sci fi visions where it's just kind
Speaker 1: of a plot something to move the plot around long
Speaker 1: and somehow make vast distances traversible by humans. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just a matter of Sigourney Weaver putting on your
Speaker 1: sexiest underwear and climbing into a pod. Right. But but
Speaker 1: but like the idea that it wouldn't just be Sigurney
Speaker 1: Weaver in sexy underwear, it would be Sigorney Weaver in
Speaker 1: a psomniatic state, uncomfortably semi conscious for this long stretch
Speaker 1: of time, you know, or or the possibility that you
Speaker 1: would have to take Sigourney Weaver's blood out and put
Speaker 1: some sort of saline chill solution in there instead. So
Speaker 1: it's a it's it's a less attractive scenario when you're
Speaker 1: talk about Sigourney, where you're talking about the Highley character
Speaker 1: and not that's I don't don't, don't, don't ring bullets
Speaker 1: upon me with your eyes. But no, no Ripley in
Speaker 1: an alien it's it is. It is early in the morning. Now,
Speaker 1: there have been some other there are just as many
Speaker 1: sci fi visions of induced hibernation that are far more
Speaker 1: than a centuralistic but certainly Nightmarrick. For instance, Dan Abnett
Speaker 1: had a novel called Zenos. It's forty K novels he did,
Speaker 1: but there was a situation in that where he describes
Speaker 1: the planet that during the course of its orbit, it
Speaker 1: enters a stage where it's just too frigid on the
Speaker 1: planet for people to live, you know, energy consumption wise
Speaker 1: in terms of the civilization, but also on a personal level,
Speaker 1: so most of the population goes into a state of hibernation.
Speaker 1: In this book, it opens with this action scene in
Speaker 1: which a villain has woken everyone up prematurely, and so
Speaker 1: like thousands of people are dying in their hibernation pots
Speaker 1: because it's such a medically tinkered state that if you
Speaker 1: come out of it, about the ave of physician, you're
Speaker 1: you're kind of boned. So so that that comes to mind.
Speaker 1: Another title that comes to mind is the Worthing Saga
Speaker 1: or the Worthy Chronicle by Orson Scott Card, the author
Speaker 1: of Ender's Game, and this was material that was based
Speaker 1: on an earlier novel he put out called Hot Sleep,
Speaker 1: And in this he has this concept of what they
Speaker 1: call hot sleep because the individuals are traveling across vast
Speaker 1: distances and to do so, they are put into the
Speaker 1: state of artificial hibernation by the use of this drug
Speaker 1: called stomach as it turns out that they call it
Speaker 1: hot sleep because the individual actually undergoes this very uncomfortable
Speaker 1: like heated, sweaty, increased temperature situation. I'm not sure how
Speaker 1: that would work science wise, but the idea is that
Speaker 1: the hibernation process is very uncomfortable and lasts for a
Speaker 1: very long time. So they actually have to wipe your
Speaker 1: memory before you go into it, store that memory digitally,
Speaker 1: and then put it back into your head after erasing
Speaker 1: the trauma. Of the Hot Sleep experience. If you haven't
Speaker 1: read those, and certainly if your fanom Inder's game and
Speaker 1: haven't explored other Orson's goot card books, I highly recommend
Speaker 1: the Worthing story because he does all sorts of interesting
Speaker 1: things with the concept of of so much induced hibernation,
Speaker 1: and you have individuals in society who can afford it,
Speaker 1: who start using this artificial hibernation technology to leap frog
Speaker 1: across the centuries, so they can't actually extend human life.
Speaker 1: But you're only able to live a certain amount of days,
Speaker 1: but you can spread those days out through even century
Speaker 1: long periods of artificial hibernation. Well, that's what Mark Roth
Speaker 1: is pointing to. He is actually saying that suspended animation
Speaker 1: is tapping into immortality, which is really interesting. Of course,
Speaker 1: in the way we've described it here, we're talking about hours,
Speaker 1: but who knows what the promises in the future for
Speaker 1: extending that out for days years. I don't know. And
Speaker 1: I was actually thinking about Aubrey de Gray again, the
Speaker 1: bearded one who the bio gerontologists who talks about how
Speaker 1: the first person to live to be five years has
Speaker 1: already been born, and that we can basically maintain ourselves
Speaker 1: like a good vintage car, and we have the technology
Speaker 1: to do it. If you're going to do that, then hey,
Speaker 1: maybe you want to take five years out in your
Speaker 1: five hundred years of living. Hey, go ahead, suspend animation
Speaker 1: and animate me for five years. That's fine, all right.
Speaker 1: I hope this episode gave you a new view of
Speaker 1: hibernation and the idea of metabolic flexibility, which may be
Speaker 1: something we will all add to a resumes one day.
Speaker 1: You never know. If you want to check out the
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