This is a little pet peeve of mine. A lot of organisms practice anhydrobiosis, which is desiccation tolerance. I work at conserving vernal pools (mud puddles, basically), and almost all the organisms that live in them practice some form of anhydrobiosis. Some can last for 20 years dry, others (like spadefoot toads) only a few years.
Still, we're not talking about freezing, we're talking about dry. No one is researching this (to my knowledge), and vernal pools all over the world are endangered.
If I wanted to plot a way to store cells, organs, and organisms for a long time, I'd start studying vernal pool organisms, like fairy shrimp, spadefoot toads, and so forth. The road to the stars may start in a mud puddle.
Or, if that's too boring, study aestivation, the room temperature form of hibernation that doesn't involve freezing and lasts just as long. Around here, that's Beechey ground squirrels, but they're only studied as vermin because they happen to harbor bubonic plague.
If you want a comment about the idiocy of molecular biologists when it comes to helping people colonize space, this is it. They'd rather study male erectile dysfunction than figure out how to store stem cells on the shelf for a decade or two, because the funding, oddly enough, is for male erectile dysfunction, rather than making regenerative medicine cost effective.
]]>a) How does this generalize to other drugs? Zolpidem shares the same binding site with the benzodiazepines, and ethanol has a somewhat similar pharmacological profile at GABA(A) receptors. In one study morphine diminuished the risk, no idea about cannabinoids....
b) It might be interesting how this relates to the amnestic properties of benzodiazepines. No conscious processing, some negative feedback loops not kicking in, whatever...
]]>https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330462 In 2017, demand for storage is estimated to reach 14,800 exabytes, exceeding the world's storage output by some 4,000 exabytes.
So not only are we generating data faster than ever, we're also forgetting more data than ever before. There's a Gibsonian side effect here of the shrinking "now". When data generation rate doubling times get down to 12 months, there's no past because the vast majority of current stored data is less than 3 years old. And there's no extrapolation of the future from now because in 3 years time, the current stored data will be only a small part of what is stored then. And while all that is going on, a significant proportion (like half) of all that history was discarded because it never made it from temporary to permanent storage.
A fine example of this is the Higgs Boson Discovery Machine at CERN. It generates way more data than can be stored so it's lossily compressed repeatedly in a direction where the stored data is only useful for proving the existence of the Higgs Boson. There have been criticism of this that the data is no longer useful for proving anything else. They can't mine the data later for other results because most of it has gone. Mind you, there's still 200 petabytes to play with. https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/07/cern-data-centre-passes-200-petabyte-milestone
]]>That's not to say it's unimportant, it's just that information flux/storage does not equal depth of history. Most of it's turned over too fast, and the durable history still accumulates.
]]>at work my system generates about 1GB/hour of zipped log files, but those are minimal and amount to little more than a wireshark-style binary log of traffic plus a bit of "this rule gave these outputs". Our smaller system gives the same logging volume but has detailed debug info for everything (and about 1% of the traffic). The value of those files drops exponentially as they age, and after a week they're almost useless. There's a lot of that data about (security camera footage is another cliche example).
in science projects especially it's necessarily hard to decide what to collect and how to keep it. I'm more familiar with astronomy, where it starts with what wavelengths you collect, then which ones you look at and at what resolution and eventually you have to decide what you store. "DC to daylight" comes in, we can just about count the photons these days... and there's lots of daylight. Often it comes down to "we can look again in the future if we need to" and move on.
But much of what we transmit and store is, per Frank, ephemeral. Even excluding the millions of copies of every episode of every popular TV show, who really cares about the 12 camera feeds for every minute of every hour of every Faux News panel show? Not even the editors store that crud for more than an hour or so... and you could compress the actual broadcast to "blah blah blah" (14 characters, 10 bytes... the metadata vastly exceeds the content size).
]]>The problem with being exposed to 0.29Sv of ionising radiation over a thousand years of hibernation sleep is that there are no biological repair mechanisms at work while the tissues are frozen and dormant.
That is also the problem with receiving 0.29 Sv in a short duration of time, e.g. due to a nuclear accident, or a malfunctioning x-ray machine. All your "stasis" does is converting 0.29 Sv gradually into 0.29 Sv all at once. 0.29 Sv all at once on eggs or embryos presumably decreases yield but does not have any dramatic effects.
Speaking of which (and in relation to the dry tardigrades) the radiation damage doesn't work the way you think it does. For the most part, the DNA gets damaged when radiation creates free radicals in the liquid and those free radicals damage the DNA.
If you're in some kind of glass-like frozen state (which is the only way freezing could possibly work), presumably the free radicals would stay in place and would get a chance to recombine before getting to the DNA. So it probably wouldn't even be equivalent to receiving that dose all at once.
The problem with ultra-cold storage of mammals is that we have no non-toxic way of preventing water from crystallizing.
]]>Size doesn't necessarily correlate with importance very well.
]]>Also, radiation damage is discrete, I think if you have eggs frozen (and well shielded from all external irradiation) for 1000 years rather than having all eggs end up slightly bad you will just end up with a few eggs taking damage and rest being as good as new.
]]>I also remember a spoof where people were stored as dry solids in containers similar to tennis ball containers. They would pop open the can and toss the solids into a lake, instant soldiers.
Another system would use a "nano-amber" to vitrify the body rather than freeze them. All atoms would be locked in place until the nano-amber would drain away and the person was restored.
]]>As soon as I gave up looking for the book, there it was. 2002, not the 90s.
Wiki - Spaceship Zero
Radio Play
"In 2016, several "restored" episodes of the 1954 American radio dramas were released to the internet. Episodes include "Chapter One: The Crew Assembles," "Chapter Two: Into the Beyond," "Chapter Three: The Cataclysmic Miscalculation," "Chapter Four: Directive Beta Five," "Chapter Six: Escape From the Hydronauts," and "Chapter Nine: Twenty Minutes of Oxygen." The missing episodes were allegedly lost in a studio fire in 1962."
Spaceship Zero Adventure Hour - Chapter 1: The Crew Assembles
Spaceship Zero Adventure Hour Chapter 2: Into the Beyond!
Spaceship Zero Adventure Hour - Chapter 3: The Cataclysmic Miscalculation
Spaceship Zero Adventure Hour - Chapter 4: Directive Beta Five (Radio Drama)
Spaceship Zero Adventure Hour - Chapter 6: "Escape From the Hydronauts"
Spaceship Zero Adventure Hour Chapter 9: "Twenty Minutes of Oxygen"
Spaceship Zero music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDG2nmpKwX8&list=PL_huAS08u78xMTsF_kxeSBvYhY_JGBjyV
]]>Interesting. Sometime in the '90s, on the rec.games.frp newsgroup, someone reminisced about an RPG campaign like that. The game master was faced with unpredictable player schedules and so worked that into the world building: in this setting it was normal that while people slept they would sometimes implode into small, easily portable, and indestructible geometric solids. Sooner or later they'd pop open into breathing humans again.
This apparently had interesting secondary effects on the setting's civilization as well, since nobody could be sure in advance that any particular person would be active on a particular day.
"Sorry, Alice is a cube today. Want to talk to Bob?"
]]>You all seem to be forgetting a little thing called The Human Spirit!
(Cold equations are evidently disposative only when you feel like spacing a teenage girl.)
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