Sorry, Han Solo and Mr Sulu. Based on everything we know right now, you’ll never be able to punch a button and travel through “hyperspace”, or go to warp speed. Travelling faster than light is almost certainly impossible. According to scientists, the only way you could personally visit other stars is by taking a long, long nap.
The idea of cryogenic suspension, or cryosleep, has always been one of the markers of “hard” science fiction. Instead of hand-waving some way to cheat Einstein, movies like Alien and authors like Alastair Reynolds have shown people going to sleep and waking up months, years or even centuries later, in another part of the universe.
I’ve always been a little bit sceptical about the idea of being able to freeze someone for months or years, or any other ways to slow metabolic functions enough to allow a person to wake up — no older and none the worse for wear — years later. It’s a pretty huge leap from what we know about hibernation among mammals on Earth. But after talking to a ton of scientists and science fiction authors, including Reynolds himself, I’m convinced: Cryosleep is the only hope we have of making an interstellar journey in a single lifetime.
Cryosleep involves huge challenges that we have no idea how to get around — but we already know that travelling faster-than-light (FTL) is plain impossible.
“Based on what we now know, FTL is either impossible, or would require energies that are flat out ridiculous. Storing brains for a long period of time is merely very, very hard,” said Terry Johnson, a biology professor at UC Berkeley who co-wrote the book How to Defeat Your Own Clone.
I disagree. Traversable wormholes would do the trick, but we don't know how to make one, yet.To read more, click here.