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Comment by scarygliders | Hacker News Reader

If one of the reasons for wishing to be frozen, is to see what the future looks like, then there is an alternative; Einstein to the rescue!

Just strap yourself into a spaceship capable of reaching within a few % of the speed of light, and fly around for a bit.

No need to wait till you're at death's door and turned into a corpsicle. Just head on out there for a few years at relativistic speed. By the time you slow down and return, you'll be having pina coladas with your new Felidae-Sapiens masters ;)

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The flaw in your theory being that it would take you equally as long to slow down as it would to reach that speed. So you would age out on the deceleration.

I suppose you could accelerate in an orbit around earth to maintain contact. But my understanding of relativity is poor

Depends on how good your spacecraft is at speeding up and slowing down, really. There are many designs which could probably do this relatively (heh) quickly.

I'm sure producing one of these things is more possible right now than freezing/thawing/reviving a human.

Alternatively, to compensate for how long it would take to speed up and slow down, just have our intrepid time-o-naut climb into their suspended animatio--- oh heck ;)

You would age the same amount during deceleration that you did during acceleration.

I think your misunderstanding comes from the relativistic twin paradox.

From the perspective of the twin on the spaceship accelerating away from earth, the twin on earth seems to age slowly as well until the space ship twin decelerates and then turns around, during which they perceive the twin on earth to age rapidly.

The acceleration / deceleration of the space ship twin’s frame of reference is what breaks the symmetry of the no-preferred frame of reference during flight.

You just need a space ship with some sort of magical fuel, which can also somehow survive hitting a speck of dust at near the speed of light.

Even then, accelerating and decelerating will take so long, I suspect you'll wish you had some way to freeze yourself for the trip.

"just"

The whole post was made in "humorous irony" ;)

However, successfully producing a relativistic spaceship is probably more possible right now than successfully creating and reviving human corpsicles... just sayin' ;)

That doesn't make your life any longer, it just allows more stuff to happen while you're away and missing out on it.

Well, freezers are more available than spaceships.

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