Tomorrow’s Tech … Today!
CRYONIC
SUSPENSION
Rip Van Winkle goes high-tech!
From Alien’s
Ripley to Futurama’s Fry
to Star
Trek’s Khan,
SF loves the
idea of “travelling” to the future (or at least leapfrogging the present) via a
longer-than-usual nap. First broached in print in 1770 by Louis-Sébastien
Mercier, stories of accidental hibernation
(examples:
Charles Eric Maine’s 1960 pulp novel He Owned the World, or the tales of Buck Rogers) were soon
outpaced by the idea of deliberate science-induced sleep. Entering hypersleep at the start of a
galactic jaunt is a good second-best, if you don’t have warp drive.
(But never
trust someone named HAL to wake you up.)
Farmer’s Dayworld series proposed
that a future Earth might solve its overcrowding by making everybody sleep for
six days out of seven.
The popularity of Robert Ettinger’s
1964 book The Prospect of Immortality brought this concept into widespread
discussion. Present-day attempts to preserve life involve decapitation and
“freezing” (aka cryonics), the old brain-in-a-jar trick.
The Alcor
Life Extension Foundation has “preserved” over 130 people, including game
developer Hal Finney and baseball great Ted Williams (against his specific
instructions).
In the interests of accuracy, remember
that “cryogenics” is the STUDY of deep-cold preservation of life; the
APPLICATION of this knowledge is “cryonics.”
And, to be honest, the current “science” of cryogenics is a triumph of
hope and lucre over realistic expectations.
There’s no known way to “unfreeze” someone safely; the process of
freezing itself causes severe fractures in the brain, despite the use of
cryoprotectants.
That’s why, despite longstanding rumors
(parodied by iCarly in 2009), Walt Disney is NOT frozen somewhere in a vault
under the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride.
***************
FTL
If you want to get across the vast distances of galactic space in your own lifetime, you’ve got to conjecture either “jumping” via wormhole or teleportation (think Stargate) or some such; or by some version of a faster-than-light drive.
If you want to get across the vast distances of galactic space in your own lifetime, you’ve got to conjecture either “jumping” via wormhole or teleportation (think Stargate) or some such; or by some version of a faster-than-light drive.
In Star
Trek,
it’s called Warp Drive; the same general idea is called hyperdrive in the Star
Wars
universe. If you’d rather use an Infinite Improbability Drive, you’ve got
a lot of company.
In 1994 theoretical physicist
Miguel Alcubierre drew a lot of attention for his theory proposing a method for
changing the geometry of space, by creating a wave that would cause the fabric
of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to
expand. Another typical depiction of traveling Faster Than Light is
described as a figurative folding of space, like doubling a piece of paper and
jumping from one edge to the next with a short hop.
But regardless of the mechanism,
what kind of power source could enable such a drastic remolding of
space-time? That’s usually where invention steps in, hypothesizing
Dilithium crystals or harnessing a black hole.
And don’t forget the dangerous
possibilities involved in FTL travel, as expressed by A. H. Reginald Buller in
the limerick “Relativity,” first published in 1923:
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
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