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Suspended animation has been in the imagination of many science fiction lovers as well as true real-life scientists throughout the world. Traveling to Mars and other planets may take a long time and normal human metabolism will simply require too much resources - water, food, breathable oxygen, etc. Carrying them all in a spacecraft traveling to another planet may not be a wise decision to make.

The possible solution? Suspended animation.

Wikipedia defines it as:

Suspended animation is the slowing of life processes by external means without termination. Breathing, heartbeat, and other involuntary functions may still occ
ur, but they can only be detected by artificial means. Extreme cold is used to precipitate the slowing of an individual’s functions; use of this process has led to the developing science of cryonics. Outside of science fiction, the technique has never been applied to humans for more than a few hours.

Cryonics as mentioned in the Wikipedia definition above is the most popular way of putting a human in suspended animation but years of research still is not enough to put it into real human use. What about putting in some rotten eggs?

What a Cryonic Chamber may look like

New research shows that hydrogen sulfide - the stinky compound in rotting eggs and swamp gas - can slow down a mouse’s metabolism especially the consumption of oxygen without affecting the flow of blood. Even better is that while the mouse did get sluggish, hydrogen sulfide didn’t seem to have any harmful side effects on the mice.

So, while some rotten eggs and cryonic technology finally provide us humans with the long sought suspended animation? Dr. Warren Zapol, a medical researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital expects that combining these two methods could cut down metabolism to as much as 90 percent. But will it work on humans?

Not so fast. We’re not mice and we can’t risk making mistakes. Hydrogen sulfide is a toxic chemical and we still don’t know what the long term effects of inhaling this gas can be. Zapol also believes that Hydrogen sulfide may not be the key element but a less toxic gas produced when hydrogen sulfide is inhaled. Finding out what this gas is will eliminate the possible problems with inhaling hydrogen sulfide.

My question now is - will you go into that sleeping chamber knowing that you will be frozen and forced to inhale the smell of rotten eggs? Hmmm, I would definitely hesitate. This research is still far off but we’re getting there. Maybe, when they finally get the right method, they would have also eliminated the stink.

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