Talk:Cold sleep

I'm trying to determine whether cold sleep is an inconsistency, albeit a forgivable one seeing as it's perhaps the most common error in science fiction.

Lizard starships travel at .5c, the Admiral Peary at somewhere around .35c. At such high velocities the effect of time dilation becomes appreciable--the twenty years the Conquest and Colonization Fleets were in flight are twenty years on Earth, twenty years (well, forty years, but the same amount of time as twenty Earth years) on Home, but on one of those ships it would have been somewhat less. How much less I'm not sure--the equation for calculating time dilation, t = t0/(1-v2/c2)1/2, or in the Lizards' case 20 = t0/(1-.5c2/c2)1/2 (the t0 is supposed to be a subscript, the rest superscripts), is a bit too hairy for me to want to take a crack at without a scientific calculator. In searching for information about this I did see a line graph of the time dilation effect. It increases exponentially and doesn't seem to get really dramatic--time being shifted by a whole number factor--till around .75c.

Eyeballing that graph I'd guestimate that the 20-year Lizard trip was actually around 16 years from the perspective of a Lizard aboard a starship, and the 34-year American trip was actually around 24 years. I guess that's still long enough that suspended animation would be desirable if availabe, especially for the older members of the Peary crew: Yeager for instance would have arrived at Home at the ripe old age of 114 if he'd tried to stay awake. Since the Lizards appear to have found the Fountain of Youth it would be less of an issue for them, but still, who wants to be awake for a sixteen-year journey on which you have no responsibilities if you have the option?

Either way, anytime anyone talks about having spent 20 years in cold sleep, they're incorrect. Turtle Fan 05:29, February 24, 2010 (UTC)