The "Cryosleep" Sci-Fi Trope, Explained
Space is a fantastic setting for stories, but the endless expanse simply can't be completely packed with danger, death, and excitement. With infinite areas to explore, there will be an awful lot of nothing in between interesting celestial bodies. Since the trip is going to take a while — sometimes decades — why not try to sleep through the boring bits?
Science fiction is a genre so big that it becomes its own artistic medium. The age-old tradition of imagining what the distant future or the far outer atmosphere might someday reveal to mankind has a strange way of agreeing upon some things. A few ideas have endured for generations, suggesting that a lot of creatives think mankind might head in the same direction. One of those is cryosleep.
The Space Opera Sci-Fi Subgenre, Explained
Cryonics is the scientific discipline of applying freezing temperatures to living beings in an attempt to preserve them without entropy. As a narrative trope, cryogenic chambers, pods, or beds will deep-freeze organisms for various periods of time, leaving them harmlessly unfrozen at a later date. This fulfills a variety of narrative purposes, but the primary one is setting characters in an environment they aren't familiar with. Cryosleep can be used as a form of low-budget one-way time travel, leaving a being of the past in a future they can't understand. The technology is also common as a method of passing long space journeys or incapacitating dangerous captives as cargo. The concept has a long history in science fiction, and modern examples have a ton of pedigree behind them.
Cryosleep is the heightened scientific iteration on the much more common concept of suspended animation. Early examples of suspended animation used magic to explain long
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