Interstellar travel in suspended animation

Most of the problems mentioned at the end of the previous post would disappear if the generational journey were combined with another scientific advance that does not seem, at first glance, impossible: the conservation of human beings in a state of latent life for very long periods of time. This state, which resembles what many living beings do when environmental conditions are unfavorable, is called hibernation when it is a response to cold, and aestivation when it is used as a defense against heat and dry seasons.

Under the current conditions of science, human hibernation is not feasible. It is true that it is possible to reduce the vital rhythm through the application of low temperatures, a technique that is being used in surgery to carry out complex or delicate operations, but the total suspension of vital activities is always transitory and limited to a short period of time, usually measured in hours.

Jules Verne’s scientific predictions for 2889

Jules Verne

In a science fiction story published in English in the United States in 1889, entitled In the Twenty-Ninth Century and subtitled One Day of an American Journalist in 2889, Jules Verne made several scientific predictions that, according to him, would take almost a millennium to be put into practice. Let us look at a few of the most interesting:

•         The average lifetime of the human population will have increased from 37 in 1889, to 68 in 2889. According to the UN, the average longevity in the world exceeded 68 years in the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, almost nine centuries before Verne’s forecast. Here, as elsewhere, he underestimated.

•         The land and sea voyages of the nineteenth century will have been replaced in the XXIX by air travel, or intercontinental underwater pneumatic tubes. At present, little more than a century after Verne’s story, although air travel has achieved great primacy, land and sea travel continue to exist, and for distances less than a thousand kilometers make a successful competition to air travel. Intercontinental pneumatic tubes, on the other hand, are still science fiction, although there some recent steps in this direction.