There was a fascinating article somewhere (that’s the problem these days –there’s so much info everywhere, it blurs together) about the realities of long-term space travel. Which means what?
Look, the thing is, for the foreseeable future, we’re going to get to places like Mars or Titan (Saturn’s most promising life-possibility moon) in the coming generation or two and by scifi standards, it’s gonna take forever-ish. Seven months each way to Mars, years and years to Titan. Wanna go? Think of what a hero you’d be on Earth. If you made it. Or didn’t. Or actually managed to get there and return in say, 40 years. Who knows, if you travelled fast enough, you might even come back younger! And wouldn’t that be a great thing to mull over with all that free time in space?
So to the practical. As of the latest science, you can’t simply seal yourself up in a pod and chemically induce some kind of suspended animation and wake up refreshed and ready to go 7 years later, as the ship’s AI calmly informs you we’re now in low orbit over our destination planet and how was your rest?
No. But not totally no. You CAN sleep big gulps of it off. You just have to be awakened every 3 weeks or so. Why? Body has to be reanimated, pumped with fresh good stuff, moved around, cleaned out – all the things we do on a daily basis, which, it appears to turn out, you cannot simply ignore for years of sleep at a time without dying. Might happen someday way in the future, but by then we’ll be folding time and travelling across galaxies just like Seth McFarlane does every Thursday now.
So sleep three weeks, wakie-wakie, eggs n bac-ie walk around, catch up on instagram, watch a movie, tighten a bolt on the holo-deck and then back to bed for another three weeks. Which means around ten cycles like that to get to Mars. Boring? How could that be boring!? Now, to Saturn and cycling oh, a hundred, 150 times, hmmmmm… Where’d we leave off on that Parcheesi game last time? And aren’t we intrepid…
