Science Fiction Themes: Space Travel Part 2
This is part 2 of 2.
This article is the third in a series of articles highlighting traditional themes and concepts of science fiction. Each month we will take an in depth look at one of these themes to help you master and incorporate these important concepts in your writing.
Frozen in Space
One way of moving your characters a great distance without sacrificing credibility is to employ some method of freezing them during the journey. This imagined technology is often referred to as a stasis chamber. The metabolic processes of the travelers are slowed down and they are placed in some sort of container. The journey may take hundreds of years, but the human beings in the stasis chambers will not age and will not be awake for the journey. When they reach their destination, they are reanimated.
As with FTL travel this will present some problems with passage of time for the travelers versus passage of time back on earth. One method to alleviate some of the pain this disparity will cause the characters is to have entire families frozen as they venture through outer space.
There are other considerations with the stasis chamber method of travel. For one thing, if all the passengers are deanimated, who is running the ship. Does everything run automatically? Are there robots or AIs aboard the ship as well? Are there certain crew members who do not get frozen? These are some things you will need to figure out in order to write your story, and may inspire conflict and new twists in your story.
Since "freezing" human beings is not at the moment a viable technology, we do not know if this method of transportation would really work. You may wish to explore the idea of problems that arise from the long term freezing of human beings or side effects that may manifest themselves after reanimation.
Generation Ships
An alternative method of transporting your characters through space is what is known as the generation ship. In a generation ship the characters go about living their lives at a normal rate and the spaceship travels at a believable speed. For this reason, it takes several years to reach a far off destination. The characters who first began the journey will likely not be around for arrival on their destination, but their children or grandchildren will.
As the name suggests, a generation ship will see several generations of human beings. Depending on how far they are journeying to, hundreds of years could pass before the destination is reached. With a generation ship, many of the passengers will spend their entire lives within the confines of the ship, never setting foot on a planet.
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