How cold affects people and how it can help humanity.
In some surgical operations, so-called induced hypothermia is used (cooling of patients who have suffered from cardiac arrest; hypothermia is needed to reduce brain damage. – Source. “Mandry Club“). The body temperature drops to +8 °C or even +6 °C. The operation lasts up to two hours without any special consequences for the patient. In extreme situations, victims could be resuscitated after a much longer time (up to several hours). In this case, they could have external frostbite, but other consequences were avoided. However, the exact values to which the temperature of internal organs dropped in these cases are unknown.
In a cryosauna, a naked person can spend some time in liquid nitrogen vapors whose temperature reaches -196 °C. Eskimos live in sub-zero temperatures, sometimes in severe frosts. In their igloos, the temperature is close to 0 °C.
Cold can not only harm a person, but also help. One of the main areas of biophysics today is cryonics. This is the practice of preserving the dead in a state of deep cooling in the hope that scientific and technological progress will sooner or later allow them to be revived, cured, and rejuvenated. Modern research shows that living neurons remain in the brain for many hours after blood circulation stops. So, theoretically, they can still be “cured,” although we don’t know how to do it yet. Cooling down to a temperature of about 0 °C makes it possible to extend this period to tens of hours or even days. During this time, a “cocktail” of a rather complex composition is injected into the bloodstream, containing cryoprotectants that prevent the formation of ice crystals. This allows the cryopatient to be cooled to much lower temperatures, usually to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, -196 °C, at which it can be stored unchanged for many hundreds of years.
If scientific progress continues at the same pace as it is now, the technologies needed to revitalize the industry may appear in the middle or second half of this century, but cryopatients can wait 100 or 200 years – time has stopped for them.
