25Wellbeing· Vision Team

Postcards from Torporville

FictionProbability 50/100

// A story from 2051

Tung’s eyes slowly flutter open, adjusting to the dim lighting. He stifles a big yawn and stretches his legs. He’s feeling rested, as if waking from a long afternoon nap, but with a slight sour taste in his mouth. He doesn’t quite know where he is, but the custom-designed aromas blowing over his face remind him of his home on the Yellow River, so he feels right at home. Suddenly, a voice is speaking to him as the lights start to brighten. He notices that he’s inside a padded pod, and shivering just slightly. “Hi Tung, welcome back. You’ve successfully Hiberday-d for 180 days. Take a moment to breathe and relax as we bring your body temperature back to normal”.

Now it slowly comes back to him in waves of memory and relief. About seven months ago, one dark Friday, he sat down, hands in hair, looking at his mountain of debt. For years, he’s had a successful tour company taking tourists into the Huang River Valley for thrilling adventure holidays. His point of difference: he was one of a handful of operators in the world still offering visitors the joy of petrol-driven vehicles. Nothing is as exhilarating as a noisy petrol or diesel car. People travel from far and wide to get behind the wheel of a 2020s-era Dodge Demon or turn-of-the-millennium BMW Z8. The waitlist to feel the roar of a Harley Davidson under your pelvis is months long. It’s the ultimate bucket list holiday – reliving your childhood, driving faster than you’re allowed anywhere on earth, and enjoying beautiful scenery. Some people want speed, others are just happy with the smells and sounds of a good old Mini Countryman.

It’s a business that Tung built up over fifteen years, having to grease many palms to get hold of supercars and ordinary heroes from around the world. China has been slow to join the carbon zero mission but a string of natural disasters compelled it to make drastic changes. Since 2035, petrol or diesel cars were no longer manufactured. By 2045, all remaining petrol cars on the road were heavily taxed. Add to that all the other green taxes – anything from lighting your barbecue, to not properly recycling your old clothes, to how many children you have – and it became quite a tricky business model. Yet, Tung made it happen with smart environmental investments.

Everything was still fine money-wise until a devastating dust storm killed his business for a year. Insurance paid out but it was the final nail in the coffin. He was about to file for bankruptcy when a government insider told him about a brand-new programme where you can save money by going ‘off-grid’ for a few months. The company takes care of it all – they shut down your home, look after your pets and use the savings of your environmental non-impact to pay off your debt. Like thousands of others in big Chinese cities, all you are required to do is to go to sleep in a pod for six months. It’s totally safe and saves the country tonnes of carbon emissions. “Like that Snowpiercer movie?” Tung asked. “Yes”, said the friend. “But it’s not a drawer, it’s a comfy pod. And it’s not a punishment, it’s the number one way to make money right now! I would if I didn’t have a baby on the way!”

And so, Tung told his family, said goodbye to his dog and travelled to Chongqing for his Hiberday stay. Six months of not worrying about bills to pay, six months of stress-free sleep.

// The science behind it

Hiberday your way to financial freedom

From 2050 and beyond, voluntary coma holidays will be a novel way to escape life for six months to a year. You’ll do it to take part in paid experimental treatments, to ‘rewire’ your brain after a traumatic incident, or to undergo various gene therapies all at once for healing and anti-ageing purposes (not to mention saving a lot of time). Perhaps, for those who can afford it, it will be a way to combine an ultra-restful sabbatical with a lifetime brain download into the cloud and intense hair follicle stimulation. It could even be a way for countries under severe environmental pressure to cut down on the resources used by ‘pausing’ parts of their population.

Either way, being out of circulation for such a long time has many economic and environmental benefits too – something that a clever start-up like Hiberday will turn into a booming business. What happens to your home, your job, your bills? Who feeds your dog and waters your plants? Imagine the money you’ll save not having to pay rent, buy groceries or pay for entertainment. What about all those sky-high carbon taxes you owe each month? Wrap up the idea of a slumber holiday with a clever emissions trading scheme and you have a winning business idea.

Why not go off the radar for a while if you can save some money for a home renovation or to send your child on a space field trip? Why not pay off your debt once and for all? Voluntary coma holidays will become as mainstream as August beach vacations for Europeans – without the stress of travel, the inevitable sunburn and screaming children.

Hiberday’s concierge service will take care of it all. Its clever network calculates exactly who will be out of circulation and whose homes are available for holiday house swaps. It interfaces directly with government and debt agencies to help clients manage their finances, taxes and other commitments. Its recruitment division will find a replacement or work experience opportunity for someone else.

Human hibernation: closer than we think

Statis, hibernation, or suspended animation. Whatever you want to call it, humans have long been captivated by the fact that some animals can take extra-long naps with absolutely no side effects. Known as torpor, it’s a state they enter where bodily functions are reduced to a minimum and they use fat stores for energy. Some animals like mice and hummingbirds enter torpor daily to preserve energy. Others, like hedgehogs and the Madagascan dwarf lemur, hibernate for months on end. Arctic ground squirrels (understandably) disappear for eight months of the year, dropping their basal metabolic rate by about 99%.

While these squirrels were obviously built for extreme cold, one can’t help but wonder why, if bears and primates like lemurs can hibernate, can’t humans do so too? The answer is that they can, in theory. Sort of. Therapeutic torpor has been around since the 1980s and has been a staple for critical care trauma patients in hospitals for almost twenty years. Search ‘human hibernation’ and you’ll come across many survival stories – the most impressive being that of Mitsutaka Uchikoshi. Walking home down a mountain, he slipped, broke his pelvis and eventually lost consciousness, only to wake twenty four days later. His body temperature fell to 22 degrees Celsius (normal is around 37), he barely had a pulse, lost a lot of blood and suffered multiple organ failures. Yet he somehow survived and recovered fully.

So, whether it’s to solve questions surrounding ageing or deep-space travel, to alter metabolic rates for weight loss, or to preserve pulseless trauma victims during life-saving surgery, human suspended animation is not that far off at all. The Japanese government is investing close to $1bn in futuristic scientific projects over the next decade – which includes ‘artificial hibernation’ – with the hope to prolong the lifespan of its disappearing ageing population.

If a nine-month trip to Mars is to come true, NASA or the European Space Agency will have to perfect their RhinoChill method to lower astronauts’ body temperatures to keep them in a sleep-like state during space travel. There are many ways to put human beings into a deep sleep state – either via a chemically-induced coma through a controlled dose of barbiturates, or through temperature-induced hibernation. This is where cryogenic processes preserve a person in a suspended state, by slowly lowering body temperature to the point where metabolism, heart rate, and respiration slow down completely.

RhinoChill works with tubes that shoot cooling liquid up the nose and into the base of the brain, which induces a hibernation-like state. While the astronauts are asleep, robots would administer intravenous sustenance and electrically stimulate their muscles to keep them fit and strong. One crew member would stay conscious while the others hibernated for two-week periods. This would be maintained on a rotational basis until they reached Mars.

If this all sounds a bit extreme, should we rather develop a drug that could drop a person’s core temperature safely and help them into a bear-like torpor? Scientists from the University of Alaska Institute of Arctic Biology are working on exactly that. They’ve been studying arctic ground squirrels for years and are working on a drug that could turn down your thermostat, so to speak. It’s already working reliably in rats, so they are in talks with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about human testing.

Of course, for now, studies are focussed on health conditions. According to the Institute, cooling body temperature can help to treat many inflammatory diseases. Temperature-modulating drugs could help reset metabolic pathways affected in obesity and diabetes. Cooling methods used for emergency preservation and resuscitation could in future be used for people suffering heart attacks, strokes or exposure to poison. Whatever can buy doctors a bit more time is very exciting work – Mars trip or no Mars trip.

The Alaskans aren’t the only ones making waves in torpor research. Harvard Medical School neuroscientists have discovered a population of neurons in the hypothalamus of mice that controls hibernation-like behaviour, revealing for the first time the neural circuits that regulate this state. There is also the renowned cell biologist Mark Roth, who has discovered that by boosting levels of iodide in mice, pigs and rats, you can help them recuperate better after traumatic events than those who didn’t receive the treatment. Further developed, this approach could help people safely come back from hibernation without damage from an oxidative burst (the body’s ‘freak out’ reaction to stress).

Putting humans into hibernation or a long-term coma? Very possible. Putting thousands of people in sleep pods? It’s not the craziest idea. While we don’t know the exact figures, medics from the University of Maryland School of Medicine have already placed at least one patient in suspended animation in a trial approved by the FDA. Doctors remove the patient's blood and replace it with ice-cold saline solution. The patient, technically dead at this point, would then be operated on, before having their blood restored and being warmed back up to the normal temperature of 37°C.

As Professor Samuel Tisherman, one of the pioneers in Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR) procedures, rightly says: “We’re not trying to freeze the dead, just buy enough time to save the living.” Whichever way this works out, we’re in for an exciting (and chilly) ride.

// Sources & further reading