Data property

 

Some things about Space Life (part 4)

Green bean galaxies (GBGs) are very rare astronomical objects that are thought to be echoes of quasar ionization.  These galaxies are so rare that there is on average only one in a cube about 1.3 billion light-years in diameter.

In "The cube" Tom asks AL how long he has slept revealing that our astronaut, during his journey, uses a sort of "suspended animation".

Suspended animation is a slowing down of the individual's normal vital functions without causing death, induced by external means. Outside of science fiction, the application of this process to humans is entirely hypothetical, although Mitsutaka Uchikoshi's case of involuntary hypothermia has opened up prospects in this regard. Breathing, heartbeat and other involuntary functions may still be present in a subject subjected to suspended animation, but their detection can only be carried out using measuring instruments. Extremely low temperatures can be used to accelerate the slowdown of vital functions; this principle is the basis of the science known as cryogenics.

The proposal to subject astronauts to suspended animation was advanced to allow humans to reach the destination of a long interstellar voyage by eliminating the need for a generational ship; occasionally the two concepts have been merged, theorizing a succession of generations of technical supervisors of a larger frozen population.

The ability to hibernate, therefore, is present in the genetics of human beings. We still don't know how to activate it, but we should be able to endure it once it is restored,. 

A suggestive case in this sense is for example that of Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, (mentioned above) a thirty-five year old who, who remained hibernated for twenty-four days at a temperature of 22 degrees following a fall in the mountains, did not report any permanent damage. There is also a very rare disease called 'spontaneous periodic hypothermia' which resembles hibernation, and in addition there are many parallels between the condition of the human fetus during intrauterine development and animal hibernation, so there is a certain optimism in the scientific community that the human being may be able to reactivate this mechanism...

The theme of suspended animation is a science fiction topos, often used to allow individuals to survive for long periods of time; it is present in numerous space opera stories that deal with long space travels and as a narrative artifice in various dystopian works set in a more or less distant future. 

Arthur C. Clarke has used the concept of suspended animation in many of his works. In novels such as Childhood's End (1953), The Songs of Distant Earth (1986) and the Space Odyssey series (1968-1997), it is used to facilitate interstellar travel, allowing humans to endure journeys that take months, years, even decades. . In the novel 3001: The Final Odyssey, it is revealed that Frank Poole, murdered by HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey was cryopreserved from his exposure to the vacuum of space, and found and brought back to life by advanced scientific methods a thousand years later.

In 1964, comic book superhero Captain America, popular in the 1940s and discontinued in the 1950s, returned to publication with the explanation that he had been accidentally frozen in Arctic pack ice. [9]

The Age of the Pussyfoot, a science fiction work by Frederik Pohl, is about a man who is brought back to life from cryopreservation in the year 2527, having been killed in a fire 500 years earlier. This story was first published as a serial in three-part Galaxy Science Fiction, beginning in October 1966, and was later published as a novel in 1969.

Relatively few stories have been published on the use of cryonics for medical time travel. In Edgar Allan Poe's story "Some Words with a Mummy" (1845 (1845), the electrically reanimated mummy mentions that his Egyptian civilization uses mummification to travel through time.

Suspended animation is used during space travel in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and its sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) as we have seen before for the books. It was also used in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes. It was similarly used in the film Alien (1979) and its various sequels and prequels. James Cameron, the director of the second film in the series (1986's Aliens) also used it in his 2009 film Avatar. Cryosleep was also used in Christian Alvart's Pandorum (2009), Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014), and in Morten Tyldum's Passengers (2016).