Humans will be kept between life and death in the first suspended animation trials

reply to post by starwarsisreal


Culture shock indeed.
Brawndo for the world!
(that's from the movie Idiocracy)


No, seriously, - the idea of suspended animation has been part of sci-fi for ever...
all the way back to the Bible and prior!! Like so many other things that have come to be real, we're getting there. Ever so slowly. I have read many stories of people who were pronounced dead but then put in cold storage (morgue) and woke up - also they have found that seeds frozen for thousands of years once thawed out will still grow...
we already have refrigeration.

Fascinating. It'd be like being born as an adult into a totally repackaged ("new and improved" anyone?) reality. Very cool.
But, there's no time musheen to take you back. Gotta realize that.

reply to post by SaturnFX


Careful what you wish for, because when they decide to bring you back to the plane of the living, you may find that society has moved into the era of idiocracy.

reply to post by PhotonEffect


Wow! That's some really cool stuff right there. Pandora, here we come!

Great find.....F&S for the OP!

tigertatzen
reply to post by PhotonEffect

 

This is wild that this will now be tried out on humans. - See more at: www.abovetopsecret.com...

They've been doing this for a very long time to humans...and it works very well. It is called being placed on cardiovascular "bypass", such as when a cardiothoracic surgeon performs a heart transplant or open heart surgery

No they don't, they haven't been doing this for a very long time.
In fact they have not ever done it successfully on a human being.
Its really keeping a brain dead body dead for two hours while running cold saline through it, no animation no suspension.

reply to post by PhotonEffect


Suddenly, Futurama and Idiocracy seem to be much more plausible.

No I know for sure how I'm going to "retire".

starwarsisreal

SaturnFX
I would quite like to be suspended for a hundred or so years actually. Perhaps over the next few decades, this infant technological road will grow to make such things possible...just go to sleep if your not well and wake up down the road once technology can easily sort your issues out...without the issues that current cryonic suspension gives (and the insane price)

But only one problem it might give people who choose to be suspended for a hundred years, culture shock.

Nowadays you dont need to wait a hundred years for culture shock.

reply to post by PhotonEffect


Amazing thanks for posting!

I thought we already had Botox.


But seriously..... Suspending a healthy person just so you could wake up in the future would serve no benefit to society. It would be a frivolous abuse of serious life saving technology.

Space travel..... You would still have atrophy of tissue ( muscle and bone ) to deal with. This might slow the process down. But halting it ... who knows ?


But then again.... If I can freeze my girlfriend and only bring her out for special occasions..... there are so many positives about that situation I cant even start to imagine.

eXia7
reply to post by SaturnFX

 

Careful what you wish for, because when they decide to bring you back to the plane of the living, you may find that society has moved into the era of idiocracy.

No big change there then.

thedeadtruth
I thought we already had Botox.


But seriously..... Suspending a healthy person just so you could wake up in the future would serve no benefit to society. It would be a frivolous abuse of serious life saving technology.

Might be some sort of strange future thing. get frozen and only come out one year every 4 years. that way you can have a super inflated population and not have any major issues with overcrowding...live for an amazing amount of time, progress the world, go back to bed for a few years, etc. Think of hmm...the ancients in the movie Underworld...leapfrogging through time.

And I do tend to think that the older a person gets, the more valueable their wisdom and gained intellect becomes...a thousand year old person being around today would be a source of endless fascination, both just from storytelling, and general insight.

reply to post by PhotonEffect


Let us be clear about what is being attempted, and what is not for a moment shall we?

First, it is important to know the difference between death states.

Clinical death is a cessation of blood flow and breathing. Historically speaking, this has been considered death itself. But 20th century advances in medical science, the development of CPR, not to mention stimulants designed to kick start heart beats, like epinephrine for example, mean that today's definition of death is somewhat more complicated.

Brain death is the other, and more complicated part of death. For a start, parts of the brain can die, leaving others functional, which muddies the waters somewhat, whereby a person (depending on the law pertaining to the nation or state in which the patient is located) may be considered alive, despite the fact that only their autonomic functions remain, the involuntary elements of living, like breathing, a beating heart, and so on. In fact, there are so many states which are similar to death in this description, that telling them apart requires more than a posts worth of blabber.

However, the main thrust of what I am getting at, is that this new technique deals solely with the aspects of clinical death. You see, clinical death can occur in a human being, while their brain yet lives. Therefore, preventing the process which turns clinical death into brain death, by oxygen depravation to the brain due to massive haemorrhage of blood for example, by slowing down the biological processes of the body, is a sound idea, and if it can be made to work without affecting the higher functions of the brain during the cooling process, could be revolutionary in the fields of trauma medicine.

I for one am very interested to know how they will achieve this in the practical sense, what brain waves of a person under this treatment would look like, and how it will affect the long term biorhythms of the patients. What I do know, is that in serious trauma cases, the biggest consideration is time. The more of it that a surgeon has, to complete a tricky bit of work, the better the results for the patient. It is when time is stretched so thin as to make all efforts in vain (not vein obviously, because that would be a horrific pun) that things get messy. Comas lasting decades, partial brain death, robbing people of vitality, mobility, or even the precious gift of thought, and worse, fully functioning minds, cut off from the rest of the body by the arcane processes of a malfunctioning neurophysiology....

These things may remain with us after this treatment is put through its human trials, for there are many routes by which a brain might come to die, which have nothing to do with a physical trauma to the body itself. But if this method has merit, and is successfully deployed, we could see the number of people dying from trauma, or having serious neurophysiological damage resulting from extended forays into clinical death drastically reduce.

I find the entire idea intriguing to say the least, and I will be jolly interested to see the results of these trials, when they are eventually published!

TrueBrit
reply to post by PhotonEffect

 

I for one am very interested to know how they will achieve this in the practical sense, what brain waves of a person under this treatment would look like, and how it will affect the long term biorhythms of the patients.

Good post.

But wouldn't a person who is "clinically dead' no longer have detectable brain function? And from my understanding there is a very fine line between clinical death and brain death with a very small window to act between the two stages of death. So I guess I'm wondering if the process of suspending someone would have to happen after clinical death but before brain death- which is only a few minutes....

reply to post by PhotonEffect


As I said, clinical death refers to a cessation of breathing and blood flow, and has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the function of the brain, except in that if braincells are starved of oxygen for too long that can cause braincells to die.

TrueBrit
reply to post by PhotonEffect

 

As I said, clinical death refers to a cessation of breathing and blood flow, and has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the function of the brain, except in that if braincells are starved of oxygen for too long that can cause braincells to die.

reply to post by TrueBrit


Well sure it does- a brain without blood flow and oxygen is a dead brain after a few short minutes. So there must be something to do with the function of the brain.

Brain death can occur only minutes after clinical death (or cardiac arrest)

reply to post by PhotonEffect


Cryofreezing.... I heard that was already going on in some parts, people getting frozen until their ailments have a cure for them, mostly, for years or decades.

PhotonEffect

Well sure it does- a brain without blood flow and oxygen is a dead brain after a few short minutes. So there must be something to do with the function of the brain.

I think that if there is a slow cooling process, the brain might go into suspended animation along with the rest of the body and not need these petty things like "oxygen" and "blood flow" until warmed up again.

BuzzyWigs

No, seriously, - the idea of suspended animation has been part of sci-fi for ever...
all the way back to the Bible and prior!! Like so many other things that have come to be real, we're getting there.

I think that is where I got my information... not the Bible, but those sci-fi things. My mom also told me the stories about people being cryo-frozen in real life and she gets her information from government sources, so non-fiction.