Suspended animation

Placing astronauts in suspended animation has been proposed as one way for an individual to reach the end of an interplanetary or interstellar journey, avoiding the necessity for a gigantic generation ship; occasionally the two concepts have been combined, with generations of "caretakers" supervising a large population of frozen passengers.

Suspended animation is also a common device in fiction used to transport individuals from one time period to another. Among the characters or works that utilize suspended animation are:

• Edward Bellamy's 1887 novel Looking Backward
• Robert Heinlein's 1957 novel The Door Into Summer
• Anne McCaffery's and Jody Lynn Nye's 1990 novel, The Death of Sleep
• Captain America, who survived the end of World War II and was revived by The Avengers in the 1960s
• Red Dwarf, which had one character surviving a radioactive crisis by spending three million years in stasis
• Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed" and Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone" and Star Trek: Voyager episode "The 37's", in which individuals from the 20th century are revived three and four centuries later, respectively
• Stargate Atlantis, in which most of the Wraith were hibernating in their ship until the caretaker was killed.
• Woody Allen's movie Sleeper
• , in which three scientists are placed in suspended animation for a spaceflight of a few years' duration, the ship being tended by two living astronauts
• Alien, its sequels and related works set in the Alien universe, in which characters call suspended animation "hypersleep".
  See also
  For some “real life” starting points:
• Cryptobiosis
• Hibernation