But first, 3 years? Maybe 3 months, though that is short and would require more fuel. More realistic is 6-12 months, though depends on at what point I’m the orbits you send them. Maybe you were seeing that the shortest distance between Earth and mars happens about every 2 1/2 years or so?
But it’s not the brain or even feeding that’s the problem. The real issue is bone mass and muscle loss in low gravity without constant exercise, otherwise you could just improve on coma-like inducing techniques to make them safer for that length of time.
But it would probably take longer than the trip to recondition the body to be able to survive and move around again on a planet with gravity. The amount of oxygen and food you’d save by hibernating a crew for 6 months seems minimal. It would require “artificial gravity” techniques like centrifugal force to mitigate that. But for such a short trip, the enormous amount of extra equipment for that would exponentially outweigh the air, food, and water, not to mention the enormous amount of additional power generation required.
A long way.
But first, 3 years? Maybe 3 months, though that is short and would require more fuel. More realistic is 6-12 months, though depends on at what point I’m the orbits you send them. Maybe you were seeing that the shortest distance between Earth and mars happens about every 2 1/2 years or so?
But it’s not the brain or even feeding that’s the problem. The real issue is bone mass and muscle loss in low gravity without constant exercise, otherwise you could just improve on coma-like inducing techniques to make them safer for that length of time.
But it would probably take longer than the trip to recondition the body to be able to survive and move around again on a planet with gravity. The amount of oxygen and food you’d save by hibernating a crew for 6 months seems minimal. It would require “artificial gravity” techniques like centrifugal force to mitigate that. But for such a short trip, the enormous amount of extra equipment for that would exponentially outweigh the air, food, and water, not to mention the enormous amount of additional power generation required.