Would you cryo sleep?

Sci-fi has such great tales and ideas to tell ;)

It's a nice idea, from a certain perspective.
However, I can see if such a technology were possible it would be the preserve of the rich. Creating tiers of society based on time 'awake' and time 'asleep' being decided on by wealth, power, or usefulness.
The upshot would be successive dynasties far outliving the ordinary man, who might be able to afford a couple of years sleeptime here and there, ensuring their position and wealth for ages untold.

Imagine only waking once every 50 years or so to manage your affairs, then leaving the running to trusted servitors, whilst your less well off family age around you. Or perhaps sleeping even longer, outliving your great-grandchildren or business rivals.

Naturally such a society would have to have a top down government secure in its position of wealth and power to enforce this new caste system.
Now imagine those who feel that this long sleep life extender renders out of us what makes our humanity so precious - our social bonds, our loves and desires, passions... all undone by the cold of artificial sleep to prolong life. What conflict would be waged by those tired and jaundiced by such a universal detachment from themselves?
 
Rroff said:
Indeed - my comment was intended as specific to scope of that field rather than bemoaning in general how war "detracts" from progress in other areas.
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war will sadly be a part of our society for a long long time, its sadly in our own nature. But I agree there are benefits so war isnt all bad.

jumpy said:
It's a nice idea, from a certain perspective.
However, I can see if such a technology were possible it would be the preserve of the rich. Creating tiers of society based on time 'awake' and time 'asleep' being decided on by wealth, power, or usefulness.
The upshot would be successive dynasties far outliving the ordinary man, who might be able to afford a couple of years sleeptime here and there, ensuring their position and wealth for ages untold.

Imagine only waking once every 50 years or so to manage your affairs, then leaving the running to trusted servitors, whilst your less well off family age around you. Or perhaps sleeping even longer, outliving your great-grandchildren or business rivals.

Naturally such a society would have to have a top down government secure in its position of wealth and power to enforce this new caste system.
Now imagine those who feel that this long sleep life extender renders out of us what makes our humanity so precious - our social bonds, our loves and desires, passions... all undone by the cold of artificial sleep to prolong life. What conflict would be waged by those tired and jaundiced by such a universal detachment from themselves?
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yeah but you cannot denty the scientific benefits of space exploration and colonisation using this technology if it were to ever become available.
 
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Cyro sleep doesn't interest me unless it's because I'm on a space ship going into deep space with plans to colonise another world. For the here and now I'm much more interested in transhumanism and getting to a point where we can simply extend our lives for many more years. Whether through slowing the ageing process or moving our consciousness to hardware and our meat suits to decent prosthetics.
 
porushinobu said:
yeah but you cannot denty the scientific benefits of space exploration and colonisation using this technology if it were to ever become available.
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Yes, the technology was initially designed to aid in the travel between the stars and in the construction of the first off-world colonies. Only later did it become the stuff of social rule and political empire building throughout the settled regions of space, all the way back to the homeworld, long forgotten in racial memory.
 
Interesting topic. Assuming it is a similar thing to a general anaesthetic you would simply wake up with absolutely no concept of the time passing. Would be like closing your eyes 1 second and opening them a second later, only a couple of centuries - milennia have passed.

I imagine you would be wakening up to a world you didn't recognise and had no real place in.
 
Five.Stars said:
Interesting topic. Assuming it is a similar thing to a general anaesthetic you would simply wake up with absolutely no concept of the time passing. Would be like closing your eyes 1 second and opening them a second later, only a couple of centuries - milennia have passed.

I imagine you would be wakening up to a world you didn't recognise and had no real place in.
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one power failure though...... :(
 
arknor said:
you would be a mutant freak in a society where everyone is genetically and cosmetically altered for perfection.

cast out and stuck in a slave labour camp in new korea
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If we become advanced enough that people are genetically altered to remove undesirable qualities, then surely we will have an army of robots to do the manual labor.
 
Actually, that's a good dynamic! In 500 years we could have changed a little. Making us a little weird. Such as I'm 6'2", 100 years ago, that was pretty tall! Now, not so much. In 500 years... I could be a midget.
 
I dont know if I would want to be frozen for a specific amount of time. Would prefer to "sleep" indefinitely and set waking criteria, like achievement of certain technological feats, contact with an alien species, cures for certain diseases have been found etc. I could go to sleep with instructions to wake me up if something interesting happens. Would be rubbish to wake up after say 500 years and find not much has changed

Iain M Banks describes a similar set up in his culture novelsI.

/Salsa
 
Salsa said:
I dont know if I would want to be frozen for a specific amount of time. Would prefer to "sleep" indefinitely and set waking criteria, like achievement of certain technological feats, contact with an alien species, cures for certain diseases have been found etc. I could go to sleep with instructions to wake me up if something interesting happens. Would be rubbish to wake up after say 500 years and find not much has changed

Iain M Banks describes a similar set up in his culture novelsI.

/Salsa
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You could always just go back to sleep again?

I think I'd be more afraid of missing something.
 
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