Three years? A low energy transfer orbit gets you to Mars in less than a year. In the past, theoretical crewed missions were planned with an 8-9 month travel time. With enough propellant, could get that down to just over three months. And that’s with chemical rockets, not some hypothetical nuclear or torch drive.
Considering how many diseases could be treated by a pause button on metabolism, I would expect this technology to mature in clinics and hospitals long before we get them on spaceships.
Can you give some examples that’s really interesting
Isn’t this just a medically induced coma?
Depends on what you mean.
- Hibernation as animals do it is not really in the cards. Humans don’t do that.
- A medically-induced coma is easy, but it also offers no advantages over being awake, but instead it really accelerates muscle and bone loss, something that’s already a big issue in zero gravity.
- Freezing and rethawing without killing the person is very, very far from being viable. It’s actually quite far from a concept of a plan right now. We have no idea how (or even if) we could do this.
This highlights that, with the sheer trouble it takes to keep humans alive in space and the general trajectory of technology, sending probes instead of humans it makes a lot more sense.
I mean, our automated probes are really freakin’ good now. And we get way more science and ‘TV clips’ back for the same investment. Why go to all the expense of figuring out hibernation so soon?
Well the goals of sending humans vs sending probes isn’t wholly the same. Humans part of the goal is study how humans live there and potentially try to make permanent, ideally self sustaining, habitats there
That’s just so impractical at the moment though.
Not that the research shouldn’t be done, but I think it one should expect, say, humans to be genetically or cybernetically augmented by the time a sustained settlement is even on the horizon. Then what? What about autonomous systems that could set everything up ahead of time relatively trivially? These are all feasible compared to he immense cost of repeated interplanetary human space travel, and the sheer difficulty of keeping plain humans alive in space.
Where I’m coming from is something speculative like OA’s early timeline: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/486e75a54a1ae
And that the future doesn’t really look like Star Trek or Mass Effect, with plain humans running around and settling space.
Artificially induced coma is pretty close, I guess.
