Considerations For Sleeper-ship Proposals
A sleeper type crewed starship would probably be propelled by a Daedalus type fusion microexplosion nuclear pulse propulsion system, that may allow it to obtain an interstellar cruising velocity of up to 10% of the speed of light. However, if the ship is capable of transits requiring hundreds of thousands of years, chemical and gravitational slingshot propulsion may be sufficient.
At the present time, cryopreservation and other forms of "cold sleep" lasting decades or longer are only theoretical possibilities, as it is currently impossible to reverse the process of cryopreservation. These possibilities are suggested by the short-term hibernation of certain mammalian species and the advancing technology of vitrification freezers. Hypothermia and hibernation can greatly reduce the amount of food, water, and oxygen required to keep a human (or any other animal) alive while in stasis (suspended animation/induced hibernation). Developing the medical technology that is required to achieve a "sleeper" type starship may theoretically be an achievable goal for late in the 21st century, depending on funding and laboratory experiments.
The appeal of these methods rests on hopes of:
- reducing ship mass by eliminating the equipment needed by an active ship-city population (without cold-sleep-maintaining and -reversing equipment of comparable mass), and/or
- avoiding the need for an acceptable ark-adapted culture.
Read more about this topic: Interstellar Ark
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