Artificial torpor

[james_davis_nicoll]

Apparently they've induced hibernation in animals that don't normally hiberate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4469793.stm

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I'm getting claustrophobic just thinking about this. I hate flying now and the idea of being strapped in, placed in a stupor and then packed in like cordwood is not helping.

The A380-800F cargo plane can deliver 150 tons. Call those tonnes because I am lazy. Say the close-pack capsules each mass 50 kg and each passenger masses 100 kg, then they could deliver 1000 people. That's about double the number of people the A380 passenger variant is good for.

No inflight hijacking (except by flight crew).

[penguinicity.livejournal.com]

But the A380 isn't optomized for this sort of operation. Figure your Average Human is fairly close to the density of water, 7 pounds per US gallon. 150 tons of humans work out to a tad over 6300 cubic feet (apologies - this can't be good for your claustrophobia). The A380 has a cargo volume of 40,000 cubic feet. So you'd need the A380's wing mated to a smaller fuselage - a 757 would probably work out about right. Smaller fuselage means less fuel consumption. Also, the payload would be a few (several?) tons higher since you only need to pressurize the crew compartment.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That's ok. I can't think in Imperial so 40,000 cubic feet means nothing to me. No claustrophobia.

Humans are about 1/10th of a cubic meter, right, but they need airflow and cooling so give them 2/10 m^3, for a total of 200 m^3 for 1000 people. Or a cube ~6 m on a side, not that people lend themselves to being stacked in cubes and not that cubes are good shape for planes.

Are you assuming the passenger cubbies each have their own air supply? Because if not, you do need to pressurize the plane because even sleeping people need to breathe.

[penguinicity.livejournal.com]

I'd say a person is closer to 0.15 m^3 (1m waist circumference, 2m tall) - but close enough. Our volume estimates are around the same (1000 people in a 757-767 sized fuselage, depending on how much baggage they want to bring along).

Since the hibernating people are running with a metabolic rate that's 10% of an awake person, their O2 demand is similarly reduced. My assumption is that their O2 demand can be satisfied at a lower atmospheric pressure. If I have time I'll go digging around for a graph of O2 saturation versus ppO2, and see how low of a pressure you can go and still satisfy a hibernating sea-level-acclimatized human.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Lungs work almost well in reverse as they do normally, or so humane experiments involving dogs and hard vacuum indicate. I'd worry about low pressure killing the people, which gcould negativelt impact the company's image.