There are many ways to evacuate people from disasters like Hurricane Katrina for instance. There are also many ways to move troops to the area of conflict. One way to move vast amounts of people, is to do so with large aircraft. Another idea, which has been kicked around, was lowering body functions to a near standstill through human hibernation techniques like what an anesthesiologist would do. The new paradigms of war are changing and sometimes it is more important to get the troops there quickly so we would load them all on a C-5 Galaxy or Boeing 747, so perhaps human hibernation is not such a good idea? However, it could be an option for transporting people home from theatre in Iraq or Afghanistan to save food, help wounded bodies slow down. Maybe we should use it to collect illegal border crossers or enemies caught and taken prisoner. They finally wake up safely in Gitmo, Cuba, in their cell safe from harm. You could stop hundreds of looters and ship them to a secure detainment facility without the stress of potential conflict. One concept of interest is the Boeing Pelican model using the aircushion or ground effect. Kind of reminds me of Howard Hughes Spruce Goose. See a picture here: http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2002/september/photos/Sept-Frontiers0050lg.jpg http://foxxaero.homestead.com/files/Boeing_Pelican_WEB.gif Well, this idea might be better used to move massive amounts of people out of a region in an airlift or air rescue mission. Imagine putting 60,000 people to sleep loading them in air-cargo containers and putting them into a Pelican? Imagine if we had a few of these to aid in the Operation Rebuild? Or for around the world type movements of refugees, which you could not feed, simply hibernate them, then putting them in one of Schulmbergers many 747s or heck just ship them FedEx. If you had to evacuate 1 million people from lets say a coming Cat 5 Hurricane, you have everyone go to an airport and then lay them down, put them to sleep and ship them out to a safe haven and wake them up as you have resources for ground transportation once there. After all it takes some 2 hours to load up a 747 and another 2-hours to unload it and many aircraft all arriving at that same time or near the same time anywhere would over load the airports and over stress terminals and ground transportation. Perhaps we can learn better evacuation techniques from this Hurricane Katrina dilemma? Think on this. |
