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Comment by xevb3k | Hacker News Reader

This is a big deal. Cryosleep is probably the most likely change to occur in our lifetimes that could bring about significant social change.

Given that it slows your metabolism, I think it’s likely that we’ll be able to extend overall lifespan. Effectively we maybe able to put people to sleep, and have them wake up 50 years later.

Those “temporal refugees” will of course be completely out of sync with society, and like a living message from the past.

Of all the weird sci-fi stuff, I think this is the most likely to actually happen and the impact could be massive.

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If you're interested in more of the (fictional) uses and problems presented by this technology, you might enjoy reading Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, which makes some use of hibernation in its plot. It is the sequel to The Three Body Problem, a hard sci-fi book that would probably be enjoyed by a lot of HNers.

Larry Niven also has some exploration into these matters.

Also, Amazon is dropping $1B to produce The Three Body Problem.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the...

That's incredible! I'm very excited to see how they do with that. It's also amazing that 1 billion dollars can be spent making a TV series today. A quick looks on Google shows that an episode of Game of Thrones (chosen because it seems like a really high budget show) costs ~$10-$15 million, so Amazon's Three Body is roughly equivalent to 6-10 seasons of GoT. Wild!

Great trilogy that explores, among many things, hibernation. Highly recommend too.

"Effectively we maybe able to put people to sleep, and have them wake up 50 years later."

Or tell them they will wake up 50 years later and then just discard them once they are asleep.

I mean there's lots of things we could do to people and usually we don't. What makes you think we would do it to chrononauts more than, say, people in comas they're expected to wake up from?

ROI

The ROI might be more social, imagine reviving someone from hundreds of years ago, they'd be a living relic.

But then why not just discard them while they sleep at a hotel you own or AirBnb or something?

If you go to a hotel the people in your life expect you to come back in a reasonable amount of time and start asking questions if you don't.

And then you go to jail...

I think the big use case would be to skip a couple of days or a week at a time. A week living in the real world, a week asleep. You don't miss much and you can effectively double your lifespan.

The change will probably be really hard on your body so you don't want to do it that often.

Or you set a trigger with your fund manager. You put in 100K and tell him to wake you when you have $2m (in today's dollars) or less than $50K.

Cryo API

I was thinking of this today: enter stasis and set a trigger to emerge only once one’s wealth has compounded to place them within the vaunted ”top 1%” or leave one in cryosleep indefinitely.

Except so many people would do that that it might as well be a death sentence since the cryo fees would eat away at your money faster than it could grow compared to all of the other people in the world.

Cryo fees and compound interest are separate concepts. Just because the second is present, doesn't mean the first one will grow. The opposite is true: When more people want something, you scale up production (or someone else does) and the prices (generally) go down.

I could imagine retirement homes where the residents sleep all week and just wake up for weekends or holidays, allowing them to extend their lifespan to see their descendants grow up.

Another use case: helping immobile patients who are morbidly obese lose weight.

I will recommend Lockstep, a hard sci-fi novel that posits: what if we never achieve faster than light travel, but, do achieve perfect hibernation, what does society end up looking like.

It's a very fascinating book that constantly had me wishing that it delved deeper into aspects of its radically different societies.

http://amzn.com/B00H6E6ATI

If there's a point where the cost of sustaining life during cryosleep goes to a fraction of the real returns on some modest investment vehicle like a mutual fund, I'd expect some of that social change would include economic disruption as thousands if not millions of people attempt to improve their lives with a century or so of compounded returns...

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