NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction

Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by xevb3k on Thursday May 24, 2018 @11:39AM (#17145057)

This is a big deal. Cryosleep is probably the most likely change to occur in our lifetimes that could bring about significant social change.

Given that it slows your metabolism, I think it’s likely that we’ll be able to extend overall lifespan. Effectively we maybe able to put people to sleep, and have them wake up 50 years later.

Those “temporal refugees” will of course be completely out of sync with society, and like a living message from the past.

Of all the weird sci-fi stuff, I think this is the most likely to actually happen and the impact could be massive.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by thatcherc on Thursday May 24, 2018 @11:54AM (#17145208)

If you're interested in more of the (fictional) uses and problems presented by this technology, you might enjoy reading Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, which makes some use of hibernation in its plot. It is the sequel to The Three Body Problem, a hard sci-fi book that would probably be enjoyed by a lot of HNers.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by edwinksl on Thursday May 24, 2018 @01:27PM (#17146255)

Great trilogy that explores, among many things, hibernation. Highly recommend too.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by drdeadringer on Thursday May 24, 2018 @11:55AM (#17145226)

Larry Niven also has some exploration into these matters.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by csisvunit on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:51PM (#17145880)

Also, Amazon is dropping $1B to produce The Three Body Problem.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the...

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by thatcherc on Thursday May 24, 2018 @02:18PM (#17146779)

That's incredible! I'm very excited to see how they do with that. It's also amazing that 1 billion dollars can be spent making a TV series today. A quick looks on Google shows that an episode of Game of Thrones (chosen because it seems like a really high budget show) costs ~$10-$15 million, so Amazon's Three Body is roughly equivalent to 6-10 seasons of GoT. Wild!

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by rgrieselhuber on Thursday May 24, 2018 @01:13PM (#17146125)

"Effectively we maybe able to put people to sleep, and have them wake up 50 years later."

Or tell them they will wake up 50 years later and then just discard them once they are asleep.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by savanaly on Thursday May 24, 2018 @02:23PM (#17146825)

I mean there's lots of things we could do to people and usually we don't. What makes you think we would do it to chrononauts more than, say, people in comas they're expected to wake up from?

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by rgrieselhuber on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:15PM (#17147288)

ROI

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by d0lph on Thursday May 24, 2018 @04:07PM (#17147825)

The ROI might be more social, imagine reviving someone from hundreds of years ago, they'd be a living relic.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by vtange on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:20PM (#17147324)

But then why not just discard them while they sleep at a hotel you own or AirBnb or something?

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by steve_musk on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:31PM (#17147442)

If you go to a hotel the people in your life expect you to come back in a reasonable amount of time and start asking questions if you don't.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by dwaltrip on Thursday May 24, 2018 @11:15PM (#17150356)

And then you go to jail...

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by lykr0n on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:10PM (#17145385)

I think the big use case would be to skip a couple of days or a week at a time. A week living in the real world, a week asleep. You don't miss much and you can effectively double your lifespan.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by cwkoss on Thursday May 24, 2018 @02:35PM (#17146932)

I could imagine retirement homes where the residents sleep all week and just wake up for weekends or holidays, allowing them to extend their lifespan to see their descendants grow up.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by dexterdog on Thursday May 24, 2018 @02:08PM (#17146678)

Or you set a trigger with your fund manager. You put in 100K and tell him to wake you when you have $2m (in today's dollars) or less than $50K.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by qubex on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:55PM (#17147683)

I was thinking of this today: enter stasis and set a trigger to emerge only once one’s wealth has compounded to place them within the vaunted ”top 1%” or leave one in cryosleep indefinitely.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by dexterdog on Thursday May 24, 2018 @04:04PM (#17147790)

Except so many people would do that that it might as well be a death sentence since the cryo fees would eat away at your money faster than it could grow compared to all of the other people in the world.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by krageon on Friday May 25, 2018 @05:38AM (#17151923)

Cryo fees and compound interest are separate concepts. Just because the second is present, doesn't mean the first one will grow. The opposite is true: When more people want something, you scale up production (or someone else does) and the prices (generally) go down.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by pwneror on Thursday May 24, 2018 @02:25PM (#17146845)

Cryo API

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by kaybe on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:18PM (#17145503)

The change will probably be really hard on your body so you don't want to do it that often.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by lookACamel on Friday May 25, 2018 @07:07AM (#17152388)

Another use case: helping immobile patients who are morbidly obese lose weight.

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by AdamJacobMuller on Friday May 25, 2018 @12:50AM (#17150705)

I will recommend Lockstep, a hard sci-fi novel that posits: what if we never achieve faster than light travel, but, do achieve perfect hibernation, what does society end up looking like.

It's a very fascinating book that constantly had me wishing that it delved deeper into aspects of its radically different societies.

http://amzn.com/B00H6E6ATI

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Re:NASA is bringing cryosleep chambers out of fiction by wwweston on Thursday May 24, 2018 @01:41PM (#17146389)

If there's a point where the cost of sustaining life during cryosleep goes to a fraction of the real returns on some modest investment vehicle like a mutual fund, I'd expect some of that social change would include economic disruption as thousands if not millions of people attempt to improve their lives with a century or so of compounded returns...

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