Karl Rouvaratz wants to:
"...propagandize for a real interstellar trip. Tau Ceti, say; that one must have planets, and you could coldsleep during the decades of the voyage." (p. 94)
Again Tau Ceti.
Again also decades-long interstellar journeys with the passengers in coldsleep. This idea links the stories collected in The Queen Of Air And Darkness... even though they do not form a consistent series. In the multiverse, these timelines will be close together.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
There's also the problem of how practical "cold sleep" can be. I've read, either elsewhere or in some of Anderson's works, that any kind of suspended animation or cold sleep first has to solve the problem of preventing the kind of damage the cells of one's body can get from either being frozen or being too long in such a condition.
Ad astra! Sean
Would cold sleep actually involve freezing?
I have seen articles on some investigation of torpor, in which humans would have lowered body temperature like some mammals that hibernate. That seems more likely to be practical than actual freezing.
Kaor, Jim!
Well, Anderson did leave himself some wiggle room by not going into detail about the "cold sleep" we see in the Rustum stories. So, it might involve some kind of lowered body temperature hibernation. Some real world experiments along such lines should give us some hard information!
Using experimental animals, not people, of course.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: there's no inherent reason cold sleep couldn't eventually be done. There are higher animals that do that type of hibernation, in the colder parts of the world. It would be monumentally difficult, of course.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I hope some kind of "cold sleep" will become practical. Not only might it be done for interstellar travelers using STL means, it could also have medical uses. That is, seriously ill or dying patients could be placed in cold sleep until their illnesses could be treated. An idea, and its possible problems were explored by writers like Anderson and Larry Niven.
And I also had in mind how Anderson had the intelligent races of Talwin, in A CIRCUS OF HELLS, using hibernation/estivation to survive the winters and summers of that planet.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Larry Niven's "corpsicles" were corpses frozen in the hope that future tech would reanimate them but the freezing destroyed body cells, making reanimation impossible. RNA was extracted from the brains and injected into brain-wiped criminals who were legally regarded as still those criminals.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And that was what I somewhat vaguely recalled, that freezing destroyed cells. And that RNA extraction/injection into the brains of memory wiped criminals was a big plot element in Niven's A WORLD OUT OF TIME.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment