Science fiction has romanticized a long, cold sleep as the best way to fuse space-time in our future adventures. In Interstellar, Prometheus, and The Fifth Element, hypersleep pods keep travelers from aging and efficiently use precious energy levels for both travelers and spacecraft. In fact, hypersleep pods are a key element for Passengers, where colonists whirring through space towards a far-off colony are put to sleep for 120 years.

Short of a warp or em drive, there is no viable option for keeping humans alive during long-distance space travel, making cryogenic sleep’s possibilities the most tempting, promising way to snooze our way to another planet.

Extremely rapid and safe travel through space is our best hope for interstellar travel. And that boils down to only a couple of methods. One, and the most preferable, is to create traversable wormholes that provide shortcuts through spacetime. Two, would be some kind of propellantless "space drive' that would allow a ship to be accelerated to near the speed of light. Cryogenic suspension is fraught with almost insurmountable physiological problems. The human body and mind are simply not well suited for long duration space travel.  To read more, click here.