CrowdScience: Could Humans Hibernate During Interstellar Travel?

From Star Wars to Dune, Science Fiction is full of people exploring distant planets and setting up life there. Today, astronomers are revealing Earth sized planets with water, and even oxygen, orbiting nearby stars in our galaxy.

But nearby is relative - and at 111 light years away, this mere hop on the scale of the universe would take a human crew centuries to reach. Even if they could travel near to the speed of light, they’d be dead by the time any human got there.

This has prompted listener Balaji in India to reach out to CrowdScience and ask whether scientists could suspend human life in hibernation or ‘cryo-sleep’ to drift between the stars in stasis, without ageing a day. To find out, presenter Anand Jagatia meets the doctors who are cooling down the bodies of trauma patients to slow their metabolism during operations, and discovers the secrets of hibernating animals. We ask a NASA consultant about how human stasis could make flying to Mars cheaper, and hypothesise alternative solutions including generation star ships with science fiction authors, Temi Oh and Adrian Tchaikovsky.

• Produced by Rory Galloway for BBC World Service.

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