SLEEPING BEAUTY IN SPACE

If your heart is set on becoming one of the first humans on Mars you’d better get your application in soon to Mars One—they’re the ones who plan a one-way mission to the Red Planet in 2023, funded by a reality TV show, and with further colonists to follow every couple of years. The deadline to apply is Saturday August 31^st. Mind you, more than 165,000 people have applied, so good luck with that.

NASA and the U.S. government have talked about a Mars mission for sometime after 2030 but such a trip will definitely have its challenges. Some researchers funded by NASA think a lot of the problems might be solved by putting the crew into hibernation. (Just think—six months of catching up on sleep!) The idea of hibernating astronauts is certainly not new—it was big in the 60’s in everything from Lost In Space and Star Trek on TV (look for the original episode “Space Seed” that inspired the later movie The Wrath of Khan and the latest ST movie Into Darkness) to the movies 2001: A Space Odyssey and its much later sequel 2010. They used to call it “suspended animation” (more impressively technical, don’t you know). If you’ve seen any of the Alien movies, you’ve seen it there, too. However, the recent research doesn’t propose to freeze the astronauts, just lower their body temperature and considerably reduce their bodies’ needs for energy and oxygen.

When we think of hibernation we probably think of black bears—for five long winter months or more their body burns only enough stored fat to keep their core temperature above a minimum level, and even their urine is recycled to prevent dehydration. Lots of other animals enter into hibernation or similar dormant states, but is it possible for humans? The knowledge we have on the subject mainly comes from accidents. In 2012 a man in Sweden survived nearly two months in his car, buried in snow. Many other low-temperature survival stories seem to show that, if done right, humans might come through long periods in a dormant state without harm.

The advantages for space travel? Lots. There would be much less need for food, water, and space to move around—you might be able to send a crew of twenty instead of six. Psychologically, it would be far more pleasant for the crew to be unconscious than having to occupy themselves and get along together for months in a tin can millions of miles from home. One of the biggest hazards—solar radiation—would be easier to shield against if the crew weren’t moving around. Of course, there are many problems to solve, like how to create and maintain the hibernation state (just let the deep freeze of space do it’s work? Brrrr). There also needs to be a way to prevent the loss of muscle and bone mass that astronauts currently combat with rigid exercise regimens. Maybe something like electro-stimulation of the muscles could do the trick. I’m sure bodies would also need to be turned regularly to prevent bed sores.

My thoughts? I’d love to see other planets (but a two-way trip, thank you very much) so I might be willing to undergo suspended animation under three conditions:

1)    The computer programmed to wake me up is not named HAL 9000.

2)    They can arrange to fill my dreams with visions of Rio de Janeiro beaches.

3)    My fellow astronaut looks like Sigourney Weaver.

The Kepler Failure and Area 51: Coincidence?

Two science stories linked themselves in my brain this past weekend. The first was NASA’s announcement that they’ve given up trying to fix the Kepler space telescope. The Kepler was launched in March of 2009 with a mission to find planets orbiting other stars. It does this by spotting the almost indiscernible drop in the light from a star when one of its planets passes in front of it. The telescope needs to stay perfectly aligned and absolutely still for long periods of time, and to achieve this it has four reaction wheels that act like gyroscopes to stop wobble. One of the wheels quit in July 2012 and a second stopped this past May. NASA engineers have tried since then to work a fix, but have now officially given up and instead are soliciting suggestions for other missions Kepler could undertake. That’s a real shame for several reasons: for one, it cost $550 million dollars (and no-one wants to see that kind of money wasted), but more importantly because Kepler has confirmed the existence of 135 planets around other stars and identified 3500 other possible candidates—it succeeded brilliantly at its job and we now have better evidence than ever that there are other places in the galaxy where life might exist.

The other story of the week for geeks is that the CIA finally confirmed the existence of its secret base in Nevada, the infamous Area 51. Unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ll know that Area 51 has been at the center of one of the most enduring of all conspiracy theories, involving the supposed storage and testing of an alien spacecraft from a crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. A Freedom Of Information request by George Washington University National Security Archive resulted in the de-classification of a report called “The Secret History of the U-2” revealing not only the existence of Area 51 in the Nevada desert, but the fact that it had been used for the testing and development of the ultra-high-flying U-2 spy plane, which had resulted in an increase in UFO reports at the time.

Why do we want so badly to believe in alien life from other worlds? Is it because we’re actually not all that fond of our fellow human beings? Is it the innate love of imagined monsters and things that go bump in the night? Are we yearning to have our deepest questions about existence answered by someone who might know more than we do—maybe even find God, whatever we imagine God to be? Or is it that we’re desperately hoping for someone to help us out of this deep hole we’ve dug for ourselves (climate change, pollution, nuclear proliferation—name your poison)?

I’ve never believed the stories about Area 51 and aliens. (A government keeping a secret like that for so long? Please.) But it seems unthinkable that Life wouldn’t have arisen anywhere else in this vast universe, and some places are much older than our neighbourhood. It’s a stretch to accept that any race could have bridged the distances between stars, but as a big Star Trek fan I obviously hope that it’s possible. Heck, one-time Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer has testified in public that "at least four species" of alien have been visiting Earth for "thousands of years." He’s a former defense minister—maybe he does know something we don’t.

Then it hit me—the reason my brain linked these stories together:

Maybe the aliens got together and subtly sabotaged the Kepler spacecraft because we were getting too close to discovering their home worlds.

Now there’s a conspiracy theory for you!