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1. •  
     CommentAuthorUnsub
   • CommentTimeJan 1st 2008 edited

    (427.1)
   I'm having a time out until I can learn some manners.
   The discussion on eugenics gave me a lot of food for thought. One interesting idea I had was what effect would a much longer lifespan have for society. Then I read this national geographic article about blind cave dwelling bugs that live for hundreds of years because of their very sow metabolism. Since that is pretty much how stasis works ,by slowing down the human body's functions to a very low level I started to wonder if someone where to make some long term investments ,then put themselves in stasis for 20 years then lived one year ,made more long term plans etc then back in stasis for another 20 years. If you lived your life like that for 10 years you would have been around for 210 years.
   
   You would have the accrued interest on your investments and would be able to
   take advantage of the advances in medicine and technology. Even at 5 to 1 you would have an enormous lifespan. I would love to do it just to see what things would be like.
   
   I don't think we are to far away from the tech needed for an idea like this.
   The hard part would be things like will the world even be stable enough for this to work etc.
   
   I read an interesting article on the CSIS(Canadian secret servic site that said the future of warfare and intel would be decided by the innovative use of existing tech. The more I think about it the more I am starting to think that the future
   of our entire world and society will be decided by the innovative use of existing or soon to be existing tech.
   
   If there is any place more appropriate to discuss ideas like this than a Warren Ellis website I can't think of it.
2. •  
     CommentAuthorCat Vincent
   • CommentTimeJan 2nd 2008

    (427.2)

   I am starting to think that the future
   of our entire world and society will be decided by the innovative use of existing or soon to be existing tech.

   
   
   No argument there. The question becomes one of which tech will be accepted and used - financial, cultural, religious and political agendas will still be factors in this choice.
   
   As for your Plan... financially speaking now is a very hard time to determine any long-standing financial instruments that couldn't be taken out in a credit bubble crash (as seems inevitable in the US particularly, and would have catastrophic knock-on effects globally). So there's every good chance you'd go into stasis and be rudely awoken when your credit runs out - or just frozen completely in an 'accident' (for which your cryo provider would be sued in a decades-long tort and come out essentially unharmed, and likely collects on your insurance too).
3. •  
     CommentAuthorJoe Paoli
   • CommentTimeJan 2nd 2008 edited

    (427.3)
   What SF has already dealt with a hibernating society? I ask because SF might've explored in depth some of the potential consequences of that kind of idea on a larger scale.
   
   I can think of Orson Scott Card's 'Worthing Saga', but that's about all I've read. Of course, his 'soma' drug also had the unfortunate side effect of wiping out the total memory of life experience, though they had tech to capture and replace those memories upon sleeping and waking. But the driving conceit was that the ability to 'go under' became the driving form of class diviision, and the result of the ruling class having that form of immortality led to cultural stagnation.
   
   Vernor Vinge's 'Marooned in Realtime' sort of covered a tech that allowed people to drop out of the timeline in a physics-based stasis and reappear in the future, kind of a one way time machine, but it was much more of a far future concept.
   
   Interesting that the idea of suspended animation for space travel has been around for so long in SF, yet stories covering its effects and applications in normal everyday life on earth make me really hunt my memory. Is my perception correct that there aren't a lot of books covering it or am I just not so well read?
4. •  
     CommentAuthorConojito
   • CommentTimeJan 2nd 2008

    (427.4)
   This is something Greg Egan dealt with in a slightly different way in a couple of his books (the one that springs to mind is Permutation City), by having downloaded personalities run a single processing cycle every couple of thousand years or so. Like Vernor Vinge's idea, a one-way fasttrack ticket to the future. The interesting thing about Greg's approach was that the downloads could experience time flitting forward in a stop-motion style, so a million-tear intergalactic trip would be percieved in a hyperspace blur to them.
5. • CommentAuthorNil
   • CommentTimeJan 2nd 2008

    (427.5)
   The Forever War deals briefly with the effect of returning soldiers effectively all being billionaires due to the relativistic effects of near-light speed travel (hundreds of years of back pay in high-interest accounts). Other than that, I recall reading one piece of fiction involving a hibernating group of ultra-rich socialites but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.
6. •  
     CommentAuthorUnsub
   • CommentTimeJan 2nd 2008

    (427.6)
   I'm having a time out until I can learn some manners.
   I don't even like the stock market for short term investments, the babyboomers are all going to take their cash out at once when they all retire en mass.
   I would stick with real estate and minerals like Vanadium and tungsten.
   
   Now I have more books to read. This site has been fabulous for giving me some good reading lists.
   Most of the writing has been more about huge amounts of time though. My guess is it would be safer and more practical to only use stasis for 5 to 20 years.
   There have been credit bubbles and recessions since the start of the stock market and the tulip bubble. Real estate and the minerals and alloys needed for hi tech and modern steel are very safe bets especially on reasonably short terms like 5 to 20 years.
   
   If you could sleep 5 years for every one you lived you could take advantage of some advances in medical and tech as well as avoiding most of the future shock problems and risks of your
   cyro chamber encountering problems. The ideal cryo system would be self contained and automated ,it should also wake you up in an emergency.
   
   I want the advantages of a longer lifespan and this seems like a neat way to leverage some existing tech to get me there. There being a future where there are less intrusive means of living longer. Imagine what it would have been like having been born 400 years ago? The changes 400 years in the future should be even more dramatic.
   
   
   I can't help thinking about Fry in Futurerama. If you have not seen the new movie check it out.
   
   Oil is past 100$ and gold is higher than ever.
7. •  
     CommentAuthorSwift Benjamin
   • CommentTimeJan 3rd 2008

    (427.7)
   Paoli,
   Vinge did deal with this in a way in "A deepness in the sky" in which he depicts a society on a planet that circles a star which "turns off" for 250-years at a time leaving the planet cold and barren and forcing the people into hibernation. It's an interesting look at what sort of society might form under such conditions, and how they might be effectively subverted for purposes of warfare.
8. •  
     CommentAuthorJoe Paoli
   • CommentTimeJan 4th 2008

    (427.8)

   @metalcowboy
   Vinge did deal with this in a way in "A deepness in the sky" in which he depicts a society on a planet that circles a star which "turns off" for 250-years at a time leaving the planet cold and barren and forcing the people into hibernation. It's an interesting look at what sort of society might form under such conditions, and how they might be effectively subverted for purposes of warfare.

   
   
   I've read this one several times, but it didn't occur to me as an example. I guess because the hibernating species were alien spiders, the entire society had to hibernate or likely die, plus as the book progressed, the society was actively deterimining ways to extend their wake periods. As such it's a great read, but not really a set of circumstances that match the base conditions of Earth, unless entire countries were hibernating.
9. • CommentAuthorzenbullet
   • CommentTimeJan 17th 2008

    (427.9)
   Not hibernating, but body jumping.
   
   The Takeshi Khovacs Series by Richard k. Morgan.
   
   Since jumping bodies is easy, jail time is given out in decades not years, so criminals tend to get lost in societies.
   
   It's not an exact match, but the third book really gets into the difficulties of waging a war when both groups have access to nigh immortality, by hiding out for decades, or centuries if need be, in computer stacks.
   
   Like I said, kinda matches.
   
   
   Heart of the Comet by Gregory Benford and David Brin.
   The main characters undergo hibernation while they are waiting for Haley's Comet to get closer to the sun.
   
   But it's not reoccuring...
10. •  
      CommentAuthorVespers
    • CommentTimeJan 17th 2008

     (427.10)
    @zenbullet
    Takeshi Khovacs? That's the ones starting with Altered Carbon, ya? I've only read Altered Carbon, but I do wanna read it again, and the others. I always associate the main character of that with the name Ryker instead of his real one because that's the name of his major sleeve...
    
    And yeah, I thought of that too, when this thread started about hibernation. Dunno which technology we're closer to though, really.