Sci-fi Writers Guild Forum

On cryonics: when water freezes, it crystallizes and expands. This ruptures living cells and kills them.

There are two ways to avoid ice crystallization and hence expansion. One is an extremely rapid drop in temperatures (megaKelvins per second) which is currently impossible. The other is through vitrification, which generally involves inserting a cryoprotectent in to the cell which acts kind of like antifreeze. This has the effect of creating a syrup-like amorphous ice instead of crystals--i.e., it vitrifies. However, most cryoprotectents are highly toxic and kill living cells.

Some recent researchers have combined rapid cooking with cryprotectents to chill a rabbit kidney to -135C. Upon re-warming, the kidney was transplanted and functional in another rabbit. However, the frozen heads are dead--the cells have been destroyed by ice crystals.

There's a pretty good Wikipedia article on this. I suspect that cryonics, if ever viable, will first be used to preserve organs for transplant.

Eternal motion...you might read the Wikipedia article on the Stirling engine, which is a high-efficiency external combustion engine. It's been around for a couple of hundred years. Eternal motion isn't possible, but a very high-efficiency engine would be close. There are periodic rumors that someone has developed a variation on the Stirling engine that overcomes some of it's barriers to wide-spread application.

The problem with "eternal motion" is the premise that the engine will run without further energy inputs. That violates the second law of thermodynamics. High-efficiency engines can run for a long time and lose little energy, but eventually they will run out...unless energy can "leak" into our universe from another universe. This is theoretically possible under some interpretations of string theory. Indeed, one theory to account for why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces is that it leaks into our universe from another brane.

Well, that's my $0.02 worth.

Max Griffin
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https://sites.google.com/site/maxgriffin1111/