I had a thought about hypersleep.

[CorporalCaptain]

Yeah the thing that always bothered me about long term cryonics is that however much you slow the metabolism, it's not halted so a person should still age as cells die and are replaced.

The only way around that would be some magical quantum physics bending stasis field, which is I think how Star Trek sometimes does it and pretty much what the nullentropy containers in the later Dune books seem to do (and Red Dwarf, now that I think about it.) In which case inducing a coma would be more the the sake of the person's sanity than anything.

Being stuck in a tube for a few centuries with every cell in your body being suspended in time (relative to the outside of the tube), not breathing, unable to move or even close your eyes is bound to drive anyone insane in the first few months alone. That's even assuming a conscious mind can operate in that state.

I have to agree with @FormerLurker. As far as we understand the way the mind works, the period of time spent inside an actual (activated) Niven-type stasis box would appear instantaneous (to the person inside). It would be like relativistic time dilation taken to the ultimate limit of no relative passage of time.

A true stasis field would by definition cease time inside the field. Only when the field is collapsed would time resume. Therefore, anyone inside the field would have no awareness of the passage of time, even to the point of needing proof that time has indeed passed to believe they were even in stasis to begin with.

That said, it might be interesting to have a story in which the theory turned out to be wrong. If it's like @Reverend proposes, I don't believe I would last a few months. I'd be bonkers within a few hours.

Or, maybe you would unexpectedly be aware that something really weird happened that didn't make sense. To use another Niven-ism, maybe the ability to tell that something occurred while in a stasis field is a psionic phenomenon not unlike Niven's hyperspace blind spot.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yeah, but I think we're all agreed that's a really stupid idea and nobody would actually do it that way.

Indeed we agree, just the ship is lovely, the layout is lovely, the design sucks.