Marshall Brain's Blog

The European Space Agency is starting to study hibernation as a way to handle long space missions:

Could astronauts sleep their way to the stars?

From the article:

The state of suspended animation that astronauts enter during long-haul space flights is a staple of science-fiction movies. But now the European Space Agency (ESA) wants to turn it into reality.

The reasons for the research are easy to understand:

ESA believes hibernation would help astronauts to cope with the psychological demands of decades-long return journeys to destinations such as Saturn. And because less space and food would be needed on such missions, the spacecraft would be lighter and easier to launch.

To end psychological stress, eliminate the large amounts of space needed for astronauts and reduce food requirements, hibernation is not optimal. It would be much easier to simply discard the astronauts' bodies and send only their brains, as discussed in A Revolutionary Mission to Mars.

Since the Mission to Mars article was published, it has received a truly remarkable amount of feedback from readers. It is interesting how attached people are to the concept of "body", and the concept that "mind" and "body" are inseparable. I think that those feelings are so prevalent right now because there is no other option, and there has been no other option since the beginning of time. It will be fascinating to watch that mindset change as robotic bodies and virtual environments first equal, and then surpass, what we see today.

It is also interesting to read the Mission to Mars article and then look at the obituaries. For example, just to pick an obituary page at random, look at this Milestones page from the August 9, 2004 issue of Time Magazine:

• DIED. TIZIANO TERZANI, 65, Italian-born journalist who reported from Asia for the German newsweekly Der Spiegel and various Italian publications; of cancer; in Florence, Italy.
• DIED. VIOLA FREY, 70, artist whose colorful, larger-than-life clay sculptures of men and women pushed the boundaries of the refined ceramic medium of the 1950s and '60s; of colon cancer; in Oakland, Calif.
• DIED. FRANCIS CRICK, 88, Nobel-prizewinning British scientist who, with American James Watson, discovered the spiral double-helix structure of DNA in 1953; in San Diego [of colon cancer].

Every day, thousands of people die of cancer and other diseases that destroy the body, but have no effect on the mind. Think about all of the children that die this way. These people are trapped in their failing bodies with no way out -- the worst sort of imprisonment. Many of them would gladly escape their bodies if they could, and they would be able to live decades longer.