I wonder if freezing humans became common if there would be people that would do it as a sort of crude one way time travel. I guess it would depend on how far you could go. Although it might be a really boring. Wake up in the future and then spend all day reading wikipedia learning about all the things that happened while you were sleeping.
I think it’d be great to be frozen, and wake up in the future, just imagine all the possiblilities!
like all the interest you’d have saved up in the bank!
That actually was one of the major themes of the Worthing Saga.
I wake up in the future every day!
sorry to link to another comic here (is that bad juju, or is it within the realm of common webcomic etiquette?) but this comic made me think of another from xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/989/
Look up Kris Straub’s short-lived “Time Friends” web strip.
Funny you should mention that, I was thinking of the exact same thing as well!
Okay, now every time I microwave a burrito, I’m going to end up saying, “Welcome to the world of the FUTURE!” before I eat it.
I’m currently re-reading Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy. In that universe, there are people who do basically this: spend fifty years in zero tau (statis), then a few years “outside” to see what’s changed. Rinse and repeat.
Welcome, to the wooooorld of tomorrow!
Early on, there’s Robert Heinlein’s /The Door into Summer/, and more recently, Vernor Vinge’s /The Peace War/ and sequels (though the McGuffin is different there; not cryo-sleep, but ‘embobbling’ in an impenetrable bubble).
As far as I know, no one has ever been successfully awakened from a cryogenic chamber. A healthy individual has never opted to be frozen, then thawed only a couple of years later.
Don’t eat that last frozen burrito!!!