Re: Re: starship-design: Suspended Animation

[Kelly St <KellySt@aol.com>]

In a message dated 5/9/98 10:53:41 AM, arocha@bsb.nutecnet.com.br wrote:

>Kelly St wrote:
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>> In a message dated 5/6/98 5:31:42 AM, lparker@cacaphony.net wrote:
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>> >Antonio,
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>> >Most of the crew requirement is at the other end. En route needs would
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>> >actually be very small. In fact a bridge and engineering crew of twenty or
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>> >thirty would probably suffice and they could be rotated.
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>> >Lee
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>> To maintain a craft the size of a fleet of aircraft carriers?
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>> Kelly
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>Hello Kelly,
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>    If you have good AI and semi-autonomous maintenance robots, there is no
reason
>why not.
>
>    Check out present-day oil tankers. Those guys navigate with a *lot* of
low-activity,
>low-alert time on their hands. Of course, a watch on which nothing happens is
usally
>a good watch. There is no _technical_ reason why robot oil-tanker "convoys"
could
>not be launched today, with a full crew on one "main" tanker and token humans
on
>the other "slave" tankers.
>    Guess that goes for aircraft, too. Since the pilot is only really
necessary
>for takeoff and landing, and since a runway can only land or launch one plane
at
>a time, computer autopilots today could do the flying and circling - and one
"head-plane"
>or "on-land" pilot could VR land or takeoff the planes.
>

Ships and aircraft normalls are pretty boring, but they need folk on hand to
react to emergencies.  Current attempts at remote controled military aircraft
are embarasing.  So embarsing that political backstabing is starting to be
used to cancel bad press.  (Seems the best high tech jobs crash ever tenth
flight.)

Nieather of these needs to operate for years at a time.  That needs active
repair crews, which are in your examples several times larger then the crew.


>    Given another 50 years.....
>

>----
>By the way, if metabolism is reduced, does that mean that cellular life-time
would
>be extended during "sleep"?

Possibly, but given the unliklyhood of surviving prolonged comas....


>Antonio

Kelly