Time Travel discussion

This article from mental_floss details some of the ghastly details of why we haven't managed and may never manage to successfully reanimate people after being cryogenically frozen. Have you ever left a soda can too long in the freezer? My husband did a couple of weeks ago resulting in the can peeling open and everything exploding all over the freezer. This image and others represent the present status of our cryogenics research. Unless someone solves this problem, we may never be able to time travel by being suspended in frozen animation: http://mentalfloss.com/article/58164/...

I read an article earlier this year on a 'cryo club' in the UK. In a country that relies on a public health service I guess we lack the private infrastructure to do a well-funded private job of it.

I don't think cryo is the answer. The damage to the central nervous system will be severe. An amphibian is a so much less complex than a mammal: they're not warm-blooded and they don't have brains that handle language and mathematics (it'd be interesting to see how their memory fares after freezing). Even if we can get part-way there, who's going to fund the vast rehab expenses? Who wants to unfreeze a bunch of zombies? And you'd still have to get over the actual cause of death.

I wonder if the answer lies in back-up programs? The late Iain M. Banks referred to this technique in his Culture series. But the 'real' you might never be the one that's returned - though that you could convince your friends that it was. Uh-oh, way past my bedtime and I'm pondering the nature of self. Another sleepless night...

Ooof! This could give the 'coup de grâce' to many sci-fi plots with frozen space travelers. Someone will have to find an alternative to this.

I think the hope is that science will one day overcome all obstacles. But perhaps the scientific answer really is to look elsewhere, right? Transfer of memories post-mortem, renewal of cells for near-immortality, etc. seem popular sci-fi options.

Nobody seems to be slowing down on the mission-to-Mars/colonization-of-Mars fiction even though we've discovered that the ingestion of enough perchlorate-laden Martian dust would spell our doom. So even when/if we disprove cryogenics as a possibility, we'd probably still see it in fiction because people don't like to have their fantasies disproven.

The irony of this is that I have just published online my latest ebook...which contains a story of aliens traveling through the stars while in cryogenic sleep. Too late to change the plot, I guess.

I think some kind of sleep / hibernation is perfectly alright. In a way, it's done now when people's bodies are cooled during major operations. It's the freezing and unfreezing process that's the difficulty.

Amy, you're right: science will find some kind of analogous answer: new bodies, regeneration, hibernation, etc. I mean, if your objective is to live forever, why would you go to all that trouble to end up stuck in the body you had when you died? With medical science that good you'd want to take full advantage.

Michel - if these are aliens, then that's not a problem: their biochemistry may be suitable for it. Let those aliens have a life-saving dose of artistic licence! :-)

Michel: I was just about to use it in a short story when this popped up on my news feed. Now I'm trying to think of an alternative, too.

Well they said it was impossible for a man to fly before the Wright Brothers invented the plane, so I think they is still hope for sci-fi!

I'm sure that I have read books in the past that overcame the tissue damage caused by freezing. So keep on writing Michael. Who knows you might actually stumble upon the right answer to propel science forward.

Well-said, guys. Scientists usually take limitations as a challenge and finds a way to overcome the problems.

Paul wrote: "I thought it was usual to sleep whilst frozen...or is it only my wife who takes all the quilt?"


Funny!

There was a an article this week about draining a body of blood, chilling the body (not freezing), and replacing the blood with a saline solution to keep a body in a sort of suspended animation somewhere between death and life in order to medically treat people who were likely to have died otherwise (NOT sci-fi). "The ultimate comeback: Bringing the dead back to life": http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140...

So perhaps those of us using cryogenics as part of our writing could consider something more like this. It's sure to be improved in the future and buy more than just a couple of hours of time.

Okay. Here's the latest on the forwarding of cryonics. Scientists have successfully frozen a mammal's brain and unthawed it a near-perfect state. The downside? The gel used for the process is deadly. It's always something, right?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/...

It kind of defeats the purpose.

Interesting! Deadly now, but it has promise though.