Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
Speaker 1: is Julie Douglas. Julie, we are both warm blooded creatures,
Speaker 1: and as we know, warm warm bloodedness comes with a
Speaker 1: certain price. It's a high level of energy consumption. So
Speaker 1: what do we what do we do if we don't
Speaker 1: have energy to consume to feed our body? Well, take
Speaker 1: it down? Yeah? Or or will we die? That's all possibility.
Speaker 1: The idea behind hibernation itself is that you have to
Speaker 1: cut the costs. You have to spiral down, like like
Speaker 1: a business that test of lay off a bunch of
Speaker 1: people and close one of its stores to survive a recession.
Speaker 1: Or the example that always comes to my mind when
Speaker 1: I was younger and I was living in Tennessee, I
Speaker 1: found myself in a car a lot and I would
Speaker 1: often listen to I think the guy's name was Dave Ramsey,
Speaker 1: who is this kind of like local Locally here in
Speaker 1: Atlanta we have Clark Howard, who's like the the economic
Speaker 1: guru that tells you how to you know, get out
Speaker 1: of credit and how to fine tune your financial situation.
Speaker 1: He's wonderful, by the way, Yeah, yeah, he is Clark
Speaker 1: how it is wonderful. But I remember listening to the
Speaker 1: Dave Ramsey Show at this point and he was always
Speaker 1: advising people and how to get out of credit card debt.
Speaker 1: And he would say, all right, you're just gonna eat
Speaker 1: rice and beans for a year, so you can do.
Speaker 1: You eat rice and beans and cancel cable. And that
Speaker 1: is kind of what hibernation is about our version at least. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's about cutting down that the energy consumption, cutting
Speaker 1: down the level of life that is being lived by
Speaker 1: the organism so that it can survive conditions that would
Speaker 1: otherwise be lethal. Well, and I've actually read before to
Speaker 1: that there are certain places in the world before the
Speaker 1: advent of electricity and so on technology that, say you
Speaker 1: were in Siberia, winter comes and a family of five
Speaker 1: probably will have a sort of hibernation period. Of course,
Speaker 1: they're going to have food available to them that they've
Speaker 1: stalked away, but there's not a lot of reason to
Speaker 1: go outside for months. And it always reminds me of
Speaker 1: the Charlie and Chocolate Factory movie where you see the
Speaker 1: family the entire family in the bed because you know,
Speaker 1: they're all trying to keep warm it's winter, they're trying
Speaker 1: to conserve resources. So this idea of hibernation, at least
Speaker 1: in humans. Yes, we we don't completely close down our
Speaker 1: heartbeat or I'm sure those people didn't back in the
Speaker 1: day and Siberia, but there's a version of it in
Speaker 1: which we have tried to batten down the hatches when
Speaker 1: it comes to energy consumption. It sounds like it's a
Speaker 1: great opportunity for board games and family use of board games.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's only they have far better board games in
Speaker 1: Europe and all the great board games come out of Europe.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know how you think like
Speaker 1: Siberia would would well know when they're well no, no,
Speaker 1: but literally, let's talk about these animals who do it right,
Speaker 1: who do it straight up right. One of the most
Speaker 1: important things to realize is that hypernation is not sleep.
Speaker 1: In fact, according to zoo physiologist Brian Barnes, it's kind
Speaker 1: of the the sit of sleep. He argues that instead
Speaker 1: of a blissful slumber, because let's face it, sleep is
Speaker 1: pretty much the best right if you can, if you
Speaker 1: can actually achieve it and you don't have any issues
Speaker 1: getting there, you're not plagued by nightmares in which dogs
Speaker 1: all your face then, or you're you're back in college
Speaker 1: and you didn't know you had an exam. You thought
Speaker 1: you'd cancel the class. All that. If you can actually
Speaker 1: achieve good old sleep, it's the best in a cozy,
Speaker 1: warm cloud, right, So the idea of like, oh, this
Speaker 1: winter sucks, I would be nice if I could just
Speaker 1: sleep through it and wake up when it's warm or whole.
Speaker 1: I really don't want to travel all the way across country.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't it be great if I could just go
Speaker 1: to sleep and wake up and be there. But Barnes
Speaker 1: argues that it's not like this, So hibernating squirrels, for example,
Speaker 1: would be stuck in something that would be more like
Speaker 1: months of insomnia. So it would feel like long stretches,
Speaker 1: he says, of icy stupor punctuated by short, costly naps like.
Speaker 1: The idea here is that their energy level is down
Speaker 1: and metabolism is down. Everything is taken down to the
Speaker 1: level to where sleep is even possible. They have to
Speaker 1: power things up a bit to actually sleep. They have
Speaker 1: to start turning on the lights in the abandoned wings
Speaker 1: of the hotel just to get to that level where
Speaker 1: that the animal can rest well, isn't there. I believe
Speaker 1: I read something to you about um after bears come
Speaker 1: out of hibernation that there's a very long period where
Speaker 1: they have a sort of sleep hangover, and they it's
Speaker 1: almost like sleep deprivation, same thing, right, like, you're not
Speaker 1: you're not necessarily having a nice, big, cozy sleep. You're
Speaker 1: kind of coming out of the fog and re entering
Speaker 1: yet another fog. And it cost energy to come out
Speaker 1: of that. The ground spirrels, for example, they undergo cyclical
Speaker 1: rewarmings during this hibernation process and it costs more than
Speaker 1: the squirrels stored body fat to do that. Of course
Speaker 1: worth noting. Even though we're talking mostly about warm blooded animals,
Speaker 1: and indeed we are warm blooded animals, hibernation also occurs
Speaker 1: in reptiles, cold blooded creatures, where it's called brumation. It
Speaker 1: differs from the mammalian hibernation because reptiles, again are cold blooded.
Speaker 1: They can't control their own body temperature, so they need
Speaker 1: to spend the enter in a place where they'll stay
Speaker 1: reasonably warm. It's not always a situation of something surviving
Speaker 1: at cold temperatures. There's also something called estivation, and this
Speaker 1: is where an animal enters a hibernation like state during
Speaker 1: the summer, often in situations where there's less available water
Speaker 1: and moisture. Yeah, right, because conditions become really hot and dry.
Speaker 1: So that's in addition to maybe your food supply dwindling
Speaker 1: in that area as well. But for the most part,
Speaker 1: hibernation and as we understand it is considered a torpor state.
Speaker 1: It's basically an umbrella term to describe all the various
Speaker 1: types of temperature and metabolism reducing functions that are involved
Speaker 1: in hibernation. Yep, that's right. So think about torpor in
Speaker 1: terms of oxygen consumption, which can fall as low as
Speaker 1: one percent of resting metabolic rate and core body temperatures
Speaker 1: to near or below freezing temperatures, heart rate drops who
Speaker 1: is little as two point five percent of its usual
Speaker 1: level of chipmunk's heart rates flows to five beats per
Speaker 1: minute from the usual two hundreds. Like you said, breathing
Speaker 1: rate drops by fift a dred percent, which is just crazy.
Speaker 1: So you know you have a reptiles out there, they
Speaker 1: go hibernation period without breathing. Yeah, and then in many
Speaker 1: cases we're also talking to about consciousness is greatly diminished.
Speaker 1: So even though this for instances squirrel is in this
Speaker 1: weird andsomnia state, uh, it doesn't mean it's just completely
Speaker 1: conscious either, so which I don't think necessarily sweetens the deal.
Speaker 1: It's kind of this uncomfortable semi conscious state, which is
Speaker 1: a far cry from the oh I'm going to have
Speaker 1: a long winter snap and wake up. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it does kind of feel like, oh man, I
Speaker 1: am trapped in this body and I don't get any
Speaker 1: of the great benefits here. Of course, you know we're
Speaker 1: from rising a little bit here. Another thing that's happening
Speaker 1: is the body fat, which we know is packed with energy,
Speaker 1: is burned off to provide energy that an animal needs
Speaker 1: to maintain levels of body functions. And this can be
Speaker 1: really efficient. And again we've got our Arctic ground squirrels
Speaker 1: and they live entirely off a stored body fat as
Speaker 1: long as in nine months. So you have glands in
Speaker 1: the body that are altering the amounts of hormones that
Speaker 1: are released to control just about every physiological aspect of hibernation.
Speaker 1: And and when a mammal warm blooded animal. Inners hibernation,
Speaker 1: it's essentially becoming like a cold blooded animal. It cranks
Speaker 1: down the temperature, but it has a set point in mind.
Speaker 1: And you can think of this like a setting on
Speaker 1: your thermostat. Right. Let's say you're cutting energy consumption during
Speaker 1: the winter. You're only willing to let the house get
Speaker 1: so cold because if you know, if it gets colder
Speaker 1: than this set point, it's going to start getting uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Uh and and and you'd rather not live that way.
Speaker 1: So in this case, there's a set point because if
Speaker 1: things get much lower, the creature may not be able
Speaker 1: to live. So the set point will be there, and
Speaker 1: it's things that get colder. If it starts to drop
Speaker 1: below that set point, then the energy will crank up.
Speaker 1: It will use some of those fat reserves to keep
Speaker 1: it at a tolerable level. Right, So each animal has
Speaker 1: its own little thermostat essentially. And you're probably wondering what
Speaker 1: about defecation. Oh I was wondering that, Yes, yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: no fecal matter is produced because nothing's passing through the
Speaker 1: dieg just 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 the bathroom. I mean,
Speaker 1: that would be a good feature. I wish I could
Speaker 1: just I mean, you know, do you actually try to like,
Speaker 1: let me just try and focus and I do idea
Speaker 1: trying to lucid dream it. Bears don't urinate at all
Speaker 1: in the winter, but they break the urea down into
Speaker 1: amino acids. And even though they don't drink any water,
Speaker 1: they don't get dehydrated either. They're able to extract enough
Speaker 1: water from their own body fat to stay hydrated. And
Speaker 1: here's another really cool thing. This is specific to black bears.
Speaker 1: They have a unique feature and that they actually continue
Speaker 1: to form bones by keeping their calcium levels calibrated in
Speaker 1: their blood levels. And researchers believe that it's the secretion
Speaker 1: of a hormone called paraphormorn and that's the reason why
Speaker 1: the calcium is recycled, and there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: clinical trials in which they are using the human version
Speaker 1: of that hormone and giving it to patients with osteoporosis.
Speaker 1: So that's that's something that they're trying to crack there
Speaker 1: with those blood bears. Like, why in the world would
Speaker 1: they be actually forming new bone while they are hibernating
Speaker 1: or anything, right, right, I mean think about ourselves. I
Speaker 1: think if we've ever been waylaid by something and you're
Speaker 1: in the hospital for two weeks with a cast on,
Speaker 1: your body loses bone in calcium. So yeah, just from
Speaker 1: that little bit of atrophy. You have other species that
Speaker 1: basically enter this hope or state on a daily basis,
Speaker 1: which is always amazing. Hummingbirds for example, Like hummingbirds are
Speaker 1: are huge energy users. We discussed before. I think just
Speaker 1: just how much energy a hummingbird uses, and and that's
Speaker 1: whine Flapping wings are really not that that economic of
Speaker 1: a system, but nature cannot make a propeller, so it's
Speaker 1: stuck with flapping wings. Yeah, the heartbeats per second. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's crazy. It's in same because I have to use
Speaker 1: an immense amount of energy and if they can't get
Speaker 1: the energy they need on a daily basis, they will
Speaker 1: just shut it down every day for a little bit.
Speaker 1: So they'll shut things down like temperature will drop in
Speaker 1: a hummingbird on a regular basis, just to maintain Think
Speaker 1: of it as a business. As an energy consumption has
Speaker 1: become more of an issue. You have various buildings that
Speaker 1: will say on weekends, only have a certain portion of
Speaker 1: the office that is air conditioned, and if you're coming
Speaker 1: into work on the weekends, you need to relocate to
Speaker 1: a certain portion of the building every day. Even it's saying,
Speaker 1: all right, well during this time, we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: shut it down a little because we cannot maintain the
Speaker 1: energy costs involved in keeping this level of consumption up
Speaker 1: minute to minute. That is an incredible ability to have.
Speaker 1: And you know is joking saying that we're morphizing this,
Speaker 1: but we can't help it to project our own idea
Speaker 1: onto this and say, could could be actually harness this
Speaker 1: for ourselves. And we're gonna take a quick break and
Speaker 1: when we get back, we'll talk about this possibility of
Speaker 1: humans hibernating. All right, we're back, So human hibernation. There
Speaker 1: are two huge areas where we could use this. One,
Speaker 1: of course, is space travel, because space is huge. It
Speaker 1: takes a long time to get anywhere. With our current
Speaker 1: understanding of how physics work and how a space propulsion
Speaker 1: can work, they're very shortcuts in mind. But for the
Speaker 1: most part, we're looking at long travels, travels in most
Speaker 1: cases that are longer than the span of human lifetime.
Speaker 1: So is there a way to suspend animation? Is there
Speaker 1: a way to shut things down and preserve human life
Speaker 1: across these vast distances, Because again, it's not only a
Speaker 1: situation of like, oh, I don't want to sit there
Speaker 1: and take that toes for you know, the length of
Speaker 1: a journey. Again, hopefully they would have some quality European
Speaker 1: board games aboard that space ship. But but then also
Speaker 1: do we have the energy required in the resources to
Speaker 1: keep people engaged in an everyday level of activity in
Speaker 1: life over the course of a long voyage. Cheaper better
Speaker 1: to turn them into low energy cargo for that duration.
Speaker 1: The other huge area, of course is healthcare. All right,
Speaker 1: so we have somebody who has a disease that cannot
Speaker 1: yet be cured, or an injury that needs to be addressed,
Speaker 1: Say someone's injured out in the middle of nowhere, and
Speaker 1: you need to get them to a quality medical facility,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be a day's journey or more.
Speaker 1: I need to put them in a hibernated state, and
Speaker 1: potentially you could take this low energy cargo move it
Speaker 1: to the facility where they can actually treat the injury
Speaker 1: and take care of things there. Another example is, say
Speaker 1: someone suffered oxygen starvation to the brain through a stroke
Speaker 1: or heart attack. They could actually be put into the
Speaker 1: suspended animation and lower their oxygen to man and prevent
Speaker 1: brain damage. Right. Time is of the essence in these situations.
Speaker 1: So if you could shut things down and sort of
Speaker 1: contain the situation just long enough to get in there
Speaker 1: and do something about and that would be huge. So
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where one of the ideas
Speaker 1: is very far reaching and super future of mankind and
Speaker 1: our most cosmic visions, and the other is every day
Speaker 1: people having strokes every day and and what can we
Speaker 1: do to mitigate that? Yeah, and at the crops of
Speaker 1: this is our metabolic right, right, our basil metabolic right,
Speaker 1: which is pretty standard in humans. We don't have these
Speaker 1: tip offs and our circadian rhythms to say, hey, guess what.
Speaker 1: We're taking it down to the studs today. Go in
Speaker 1: your cave. Um, we're pretty regular when it comes there
Speaker 1: as basil metabolic rate unless you're like a super yogi, right,
Speaker 1: and you can you can tinker with it a bit.
Speaker 1: You could, you know, decent parlor tricks and opportun you
Speaker 1: were dead for eighteen hours or something when in fact
Speaker 1: you were not, but you had again taken down your
Speaker 1: breathing and your heart rate. Okay, so beyond a yogi,
Speaker 1: what are we thinking about here? Well, they're basically looking
Speaker 1: at ways to either use temperature or chemicals to force
Speaker 1: a hibernative state on human beings. And we are certainly
Speaker 1: not there yet, but but a number of experiments have
Speaker 1: been conducted. Mostly these are involving animals, and we're looking
Speaker 1: at ways, all right, can we take animals, either hibernating
Speaker 1: animals or non hibernating animals, tinker with them either with
Speaker 1: temperature or chemicals, and force a hibernative state. Biologists at
Speaker 1: the Institute of Arctic Biology and Fairbanks, Alaska are particularly
Speaker 1: interested in this. They do a lot of inquiries into
Speaker 1: how Arctic ground squirrels behave and how the hibernate They
Speaker 1: point out that artic 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, that's what it is. That's what's
Speaker 1: going on. So they buys a number of experiments where
Speaker 1: they took non hibernating Arctic ground squirrels and they gave
Speaker 1: them a substance that stimulated a denazine receptors in the brain.
Speaker 1: And then they also gave a substance similar to caffeine
Speaker 1: to arouse other squirrels. And I mean to rouse them
Speaker 1: from there, not to yeah, yeah, not to arouse them sexually.
Speaker 1: So in this same way that a denazine is involved
Speaker 1: in that drowsy feeling you're getting, we're also counteracting it
Speaker 1: when we run for that cup of coffee or that
Speaker 1: discussing energy. That's right, I mean that splits the binding point, right.
Speaker 1: It basically says, I guess what you're not going to
Speaker 1: bind here, I'm caffeine. I'm waking this person back up,
Speaker 1: which I thought was fascinating. I mean, we know, obviously,
Speaker 1: we know that caffeine purchase up, but to know that
Speaker 1: it works that specifically, and in these experiments they were
Speaker 1: able to activate a denazine receptors in sufficient enough manner
Speaker 1: to induce this hibernative state in these Arctic ground squirrels
Speaker 1: during the hibernation season. A small experiment in some senses,
Speaker 1: you know, they're not certainly it's not the same as say, oh,
Speaker 1: we put a human into hibernative state. In this case,
Speaker 1: we took the ground squirrel and we're able to induce hibernation.
Speaker 1: And it's actually rather big. I mean, it's one of
Speaker 1: the steps that could conceivably lead us to being able
Speaker 1: to create this effect in humans. Right. Another really good
Speaker 1: example is I keep thinking of it as pet cemetery.
Speaker 1: I have to say the zombie dogs. This is from
Speaker 1: the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1: They put dogs in a state of suspended animation by
Speaker 1: flushing out their bodies of blood, taking out their blood
Speaker 1: and replacing it with forty five degree fahrenheit saline solution
Speaker 1: that contained oxygen and glucose. The dogs went into cardiac
Speaker 1: arrest and they clinically died right after three hours. The
Speaker 1: team withdrew the solution, so they reversed this process. They
Speaker 1: reintroduced the blood and then applied to gentle electric shock
Speaker 1: and the dogs were raised from the dead. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was a similar experiment that was conducted by surgeon at
Speaker 1: the Messacuset General Hospital in Boston, Like I'm in the
Speaker 1: name of Hassan Alam, and he tested the technique about
Speaker 1: two hundred times on pigs with a success rate, and
Speaker 1: it basically involved putting the animal under draining out some blood.
Speaker 1: In this case, he'd used cuts and major veins to
Speaker 1: stimulate the multiple gunshot wounds, so he was trying to
Speaker 1: create the situation of fatal or life threatening injury. And
Speaker 1: then as the pig rapidly loses about half its blood
Speaker 1: and there is 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. Than the animal's temperature falls
Speaker 1: to about tend to be celsius until it enters this
Speaker 1: state of profound hypothermia, and then later they are able
Speaker 1: to put the blood back in and restore the pig
Speaker 1: to life. Yeah, and again, it's not about terrorizing dogs
Speaker 1: and pigs. It's about trying to create these trauma situations
Speaker 1: that might happen in a hospital and giving doctors an
Speaker 1: alternative in terms of trying to extend the life period
Speaker 1: and be able to take out all the tools in
Speaker 1: the arsenal to help that person. And speaking about apthermia,
Speaker 1: it just made me think about cell biologist Mark Roth.
Speaker 1: He has a great ted talk about this about suspended animation.
Speaker 1: He may be the furthest along I think in trauma
Speaker 1: medicine in terms of looking at ways that we can
Speaker 1: play with hibernation. He was inspired by a skier in
Speaker 1: Norway who was trapped in the icy waterfall for two
Speaker 1: hours before she was extracted. She had no heartbeat and
Speaker 1: she was thought to be frozen dead. Seven hours later,
Speaker 1: still without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life
Speaker 1: and she went on to be the head 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 arranty even
Speaker 1: try to mess with our metabolic rate in this way.
Speaker 1: But he just kept picking up the problem, picking at
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 ding ning 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 thin again and put it in the cold environment
Speaker 1: because he thinks that there's something key to this cool
Speaker 1: environment that happened with the skier. And indeed, then Mike
Speaker 1: started stopped moving, appeared dead. Oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold.
Speaker 1: So this again, this is really important, right because we
Speaker 1: don't have brains to starve from lack of oxygen. But
Speaker 1: he says, this is the real kicker. That hydrogen sulfide
Speaker 1: is rapidly metabolized. So if you were dosed with US
Speaker 1: after six hours of d animation. All you would have
Speaker 1: to do is be put out into room air and
Speaker 1: warm up and you would be, in his words, none
Speaker 1: the worse for wear. So and one model of heart
Speaker 1: attack animals were given the hydrogen sulfide and they showed
Speaker 1: a seventy percent reduction and heart damage compared to those
Speaker 1: who got the standard of care that you and I
Speaker 1: were to receive if we were to have a heart
Speaker 1: attack here today. And the same is true for organ failures.
Speaker 1: So when you have a loss of function and going
Speaker 1: to poor profusion of kidney or liver, you have damage
Speaker 1: that suffered. So in two he started human trials and
Speaker 1: he says that we're on the path of really understanding
Speaker 1: this metabolic flexibility and the not too distant future we
Speaker 1: could have e m T s actually giving people this
Speaker 1: hydrogen is fullified and extending the their lives possibly you know,
Speaker 1: so you know, if you were in an emergency situation,
Speaker 1: you're being transported, you might be able to be put
Speaker 1: under in this suspended animation and not have any ill
Speaker 1: effects to your tissue. Well, that one of the take
Speaker 1: comes 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 pot. Right. But but
Speaker 1: but like the idea that it wouldn't just be Sigorny
Speaker 1: Weaver in sexy underwear, it would be Sigourney Weaver in
Speaker 1: a sosomniatic 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 Siggorny 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: talking about Sigorny where you're talking about the Riley character
Speaker 1: and not Gus. That's I don't don't, don't don't ring
Speaker 1: bullets of pony with your eyes. Yeah, but no, no
Speaker 1: Ripley in an alien it's it is it is early
Speaker 1: in the morning. Now, there have been some other There
Speaker 1: are just as many sci fi visions of induced tibernation
Speaker 1: that are far more in a centur realistic but certainly Nightmarrick.
Speaker 1: For instance, Dan Abnett had a novel called Zenoes. It
Speaker 1: was forty k novels he did that there was a
Speaker 1: situation in that where he describes a planet that during
Speaker 1: the course of its orbit, it enters a stage where
Speaker 1: it's just too frigid on the planet for people to live, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, energy consumption wise in terms of the civilization,
Speaker 1: but also on a personal level. So most of the
Speaker 1: population goes into a state of hibernation. And this book,
Speaker 1: it opens with this action scene in which a villain
Speaker 1: has woken everyone up prematurely, and so like thousands of
Speaker 1: people are dying in their hibernation pots because it's such
Speaker 1: a medically tinkered state that if you come out of
Speaker 1: it without the aid of a physician, you're you're kind
Speaker 1: of boned. So so that that that comes to mind.
Speaker 1: Another title that comes to mind is the Worthing Saga
Speaker 1: over the Worthy Chronicle by Orson Scott Card, the author
Speaker 1: of Indur'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 this
Speaker 1: state of artificial hibernation by the use of this drug
Speaker 1: called stomach As it turns out, though 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 Fano Mendor's game and
Speaker 1: haven't explored other orson Scott card books, I highly recommend
Speaker 1: the Worthing sorry, 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 just grabbed it here we're talking
Speaker 1: about hours, but who knows what the promises in the
Speaker 1: future for extending that out for days years? I don't know.
Speaker 1: And I was actually thinking about Aubrey de Gray again,
Speaker 1: the bearded one who the bio gerontologists, who talks about
Speaker 1: how the first person to live to be five hundred
Speaker 1: years has already been born, and that we can basically
Speaker 1: maintain ourselves like a good vintage car, and we have
Speaker 1: the technology to do it. If you're going to do that,
Speaker 1: then hey, maybe you want to take five years out
Speaker 1: in your five hundred years of living. Hey, go ahead,
Speaker 1: suspend animation, animate me for five years. That's fine. Cool. Well, hey,
Speaker 1: we're on board with that. Yeah, I'm on board with it. Well,
Speaker 1: how about the rest of you. If you have any
Speaker 1: cool examples of induced human hibernation from science fiction that
Speaker 1: you would like to point out right in, let me
Speaker 1: know about it and I'll bring it up on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Or if you have just general thoughts about the hibernation
Speaker 1: in general in animals and how it might affect human life.
Speaker 1: What if you could hybernate? What would you hybernate through?
Speaker 1: We're curious to know, and be sure to check out
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Speaker 1: the web that are tied to our brand. First of all,
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Kid's Mind. We've been talking about it.
Speaker 1: It's a video series that we did ten episodes in
Speaker 1: which we do ten different science experiments, science experiments that
Speaker 1: that you and or your child can try at home,
Speaker 1: and we walk you through this experiment, and then we
Speaker 1: discuss the ways that the science in this experiment connects
Speaker 1: you to the larger world and to the cosmos. It's
Speaker 1: pretty exciting, really well done. We're very proud of it.
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Speaker 1: promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.