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Travel to the stars is going to require some way of preserving life for decades or centuries — is suspended animation the answer? How close are we to a journey to Pandora?
By Roy Huff
Long-distance space travel, traveling at sub-light speeds, will require a way to make the journey with a crew of aging humans. While it’s possible to avoid some of that through time dilation (a quirk of physics that slows down time for anything that speeds up), humans wouldn’t save a large amount of time until the ship reaches 90% of the speed of light.
Assuming we could build ships that can go that fast, we could cut aging in half. At 99.5% light speed, we would age at only ten percent relative to an observer at rest.
The problem is physics. More acceleration means more energy. We could conceivably accelerate a ship in the vacuum of space given enough time, but slowing down the ship fast enough without killing us is another problem entirely.
Ideally, we would accelerate the ship slowly, and then slow it down before stopping with enough lead time. The only problem is that it requires an energy source we can access on both sides.
We may someday solve the challenges of near light-speed travel, but until then, any ship traveling less than 99.99999% the speed of light for distances…
