Hibernation continued – 3.23pm Sunday December 29th, 2024

I noticed there had been an interest in the condition of hibernation, in relation to space travel I would think?

I could likely hibernate for a couple of months and be reasonably alright, although the absence of weight-bearing would have an impact.

But the fully functioning ‘initiate system’ wouldn’t cope I feel. The person would have to slowly be conditioned to strengthen their response system.

This I feel would be very difficult.

Mine is the way it is due to the shutting down of ‘initiate’ functions which includes breathing for example. The difference for me is that it wasn’t instant. The more sudden and severe the shutdown is, the more difficult it is to actually survive sadly. But having the pattern of effect, that is unique to each person, mine was slowed down, which, for example allowed my response system time to takeover my breathing when awake, as well as when asleep. This is not ideal, it’s terribly frightening and not without risk, and because the process was slowed it meant I was put through the initiate system stopping and the response system taking over quite a numerous amount of times, but one doesn’t get any choice, and ultimately the response system builds up capacity as more and more is required of it.

An astronaut needs their fully functional initiate system, there would be room for some enhancement of their response system but likely not to the degree for hibernation to be well tolerated.

An example too is water for instance, most people need to consume water daily so an astronaut would need to be watered, whereas I could go without water during hibernation. Things like that begin to mount up and present the overall difficulty for long haul space travel I expect.

The human body has so many requirements and we are using so much of our genome, that we don’t have a lot of room for variance in what is required to keep us sustained.

Fiona MacLeod (C)