It turned out that the nearby NASA research facility was developing a version of the Streptoccucus bacteria that, when injected into a person, produced a ton of hydrogen sulfide, reducing the person’s breathing rate and core body temperature– essentially, hibernation.  As it happens, hydrogen sulfide (familiar to which anyone who’s ever smelt a rotten egg), is considered one of the possible options for inducing hibernation in mammals.

In 2003, Mark Roth, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, saw a documentary on spelunkers that discussed the danger of hydrogen sulfide: the gas is produced by volcanoes and deep-earth vents, and it can rapidly induce a coma. Moth imagined that breathing a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and other gases could cut off just the right amount of oxygen to the blood to induce suspended animation in mammals. He experimented by putting a mouse in a chamber with 80 ppm hydrogen sulfide, and the mouse entered a state of hibernation (the character of Jacob Hood demonstrates this effect on the show). His results were replicated in May by scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital. Unfortunately, a January paper in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine showed that there were problems getting the technique to work on larger mammal, like pigs. Instead of inducing a state of hibernation, the study found the gas actually acted as a stimulant.

But there’s always the vampiric alternative. In 2005, Dr. Patrick Kochanek drained dogs of about half their blood and replaced it with a cold saline solution. The process actually put the dogs into totally suspended animation. As reported in DISCOVER, the dogs had no heartbeat, no breathing, nothing.  The dogs were left asleep for three hours before Kochanek pumped the saline out and the blood back in. Most of the dogs came back to life with no ill effects. A few dogs suffered from brain damage and lethargy, leading to charges of “zombie dogs”.

Following up on this research the next year, a scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Hasan Alam,  was looking into ways to keep a critically injured patient alive while awaiting surgery. Alam actually drained  a pig’s blood almost entirely before replacing it with a cold saline solution of nutrients. He left the pigs in this state of animation for two hours to approximate surgery, and then revived them. He’s tried his technique on 200 pigs and achieved a 90% success rate for revivals.

The way I figure it, putting humans into hibernation — even extreme hibernation —  isn’t going to make it possible for a single person to traverse the light years between us and our stellar neighbors. It just takes too long, even at an extremely slowed metabolic rate. For that we’ll still need either a generation ship or straight up cryonics. But for shorter, but still tedious,  journeys between planets, traveling in hibernation may be just the thing. Personally, I hope they’re able to improve on the hydrogen sulfide technique, rather than the cold-saline technique. I don’t think anyone likes the idea of traveling 100 million km to Mars with half their blood in the fridge.

Sanctuary is a show about a small group of investigators, lead by Tapping’s character of Helen Magnus, which specializes in finding sentient mutants and monsters. Some are helped; those of a more aggressive turn of mind are captured. Magnus is, incidently, well over a hundred years old, having become immortal sometime in the Victorian Era via an incident which will be revealed later. Magnus is aided by her bounty-hunter-esque daughter and the new guy (and audience surrogate), a psychiatrist.

The show started life in 2007 as a series of eight webisodes, which form the basis of tonight’s two-hour pilot. However, for those who’ve seen the webisodes, from what I could see in the 30-minute edit Sci Fi showed us last night, there have been changes, including a significant revision in the psychiatrist’s back story.

The show promises to be a lot of fun, and its long gestation period seems to have taught the creators how to use their enormous use of VFX appropriately in the service of storytelling instead of just hitting the audience with flashy gee-whiz scene after scene: Santuary is the first television series to almost exclusively use virtual sets — apart from the props that come into direct contact with the cast, pretty much everything you see on screen (including furniture) is computer generated.

And despite the supernatural connotations of monsters like werewolves, etc., the creators promise that the show will be firmly rooted in science fiction, and explained some of their ground rules at the panel discussion that followed the screening: There is supposed to be a “scientific explanation for everything,” said Sam Egan, a TV science-fiction veteran and writer on Sanctuary, “we’re at the boundary where science fiction and science fact meet.” This involves a certain discipline when it comes to plotlines, with show creator Damien Kindler citing a “no aliens” rule, for example, to keep the tone of the show grounded. A willingness to live within limits is a good sign for a show — when shows start making it up as they go along (see the later seasons of the X-Files for example), or start invoking endless deus ex machinas to resolve stories (Fringe is really starting to worry me here), it ultimately kills dramatic tension.

So far, Sanctuary looks like a show that deserves to do well. Now let’s see if the television gods smile upon it…

One of the entities turned out to be none other than Elizabeth Weir, onetime leader of the Atlantis expedition, who was believed to have been killed after her capture by the Replicators, technologically advanced humanoid life forms assembled from countless tiny nanoscale robots (played by a different actress in this episode). Weir has become a Replicator too, and has joined a small band interested in following in the footsteps of the Replicator’s creators (and humanity’s pseudo-ancestors), a super-duper technologically advanced race known as the Ancients. The Ancients are (more or less) no longer around, having long since ascended to another plane of existence. Ironically, it seems as if the fact that the Replicators are technological constructs is the limiting factor in preventing their ascension—the Ancient’s path to the next plane of existence appears to be a biologically-based one.

Part of the irony is because real-world thinking about the ability to transcend the bounds of our current existence is very firmly tied to progress in the computing realm. One scenario involves computers reaching a point where they can host a human mind, with silicon (or other, more exotic, materials) providing a substrate for a consciousness just as the neurons within our skulls provide a substrate for our minds today. Humans would scan themselves in, and digital versions of themselves would be free of the limits of our biological bodies, including death and disease. This scenario is only one of a number of possible futures that all fall under the rubric of the singularity, a term coined by futurist Vernor Vinge. Essentially, the singularity is a point sitting sometime in our future where the pace of technological change becomes so rapid, and makes such deep impact on our existence, that being able to envision what happens after the singularity is like a chimpanzee trying to figure out the design schematics for the space shuttle.

Freezing someone in order to revive them later is a common idea in science fiction. And it’s probably one of the areas where people are trying their hardest to turn science fiction into science fact.

Usually referred to as cryogenics, but more accurately described as cryonics, the appeal of this technology is obvious: a recently-dead or dying person could be frozen until such time as medical science discovers the fountain of youth and works out how to revive decades- or centuries-old carefully preserved corpses. And indeed, the first part of the equation may already have become reality. Companies such as Alcor will chill recently deceased (ideally within 15 minutes of death) individuals to temperatures below 180 degrees Fahrenheit. However, it is not known what affect this process would have on a subject’s mind, and there is no currently known way to revive a patient—and there may never be. Still that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from taking the chance—nearly 1,000 80 people are already stored in Alcor’s vaults (and for the record, it’s a gamble I’d be willing to take too, but unless the cost of living gets a lot cheaper, the starting price of $80,000 to preserve just my head is a truly fictional sum of money for me to stump up, even with clever financing options.)

On a less ambitious scale, people have been revived after lethal exposure to cold (the timescale here is tens of minutes, not years). And as DISCOVER reported last year, suspended-animation researchers have revived dogs that were clinically dead for as long as three hours. The immediate practical application here that the scientists are looking at is for trauma victims. Sometimes people receive injuries which could be surgically repaired in theory, but in practice it just takes too long to transport the patient to a hospital and then conduct a complex operation. The hope is that these people could be placed in suspended animation at the scene of the injury, and then operated upon in a relatively leisurely fashion. Clinical trials are currently being designed, but it will probably be many years before this becomes anything like a commonplace therapy. Until then, you can spend some of your time rooting for The Powers That Be to order a second season of The Middleman.

Even if you were an immortal, sword-wielding Scottish badass, how long could you statistically be expected to live? Over hundreds or thousands of years, wouldn’t you be just as likely to be decapitated in a car crash as by another immortal?

Not so, as we reported in the November 2007 issue of the magazine:

“Each year, American adults have, overall, a 1-in-1,743 chance of dying in an accident. That means that even if nothing else killed you—doing away with old age and disease—you would on average live to be 1,743 years old before a fatal accident. But you could do better. A 9-year-old child has much lower odds of accidental death, about 1 in 10,000. If we could keep everyone to this low rate (avoiding work and driving would probably help), we could typically live 10,000 years. About 37 percent of the population would do better yet, living on average to the ripe old age of 20,000, says James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.”