Time Travel and Cryogenics

Who doesn't think that it would be really cool to travel in time? Forward or back, either would be good. At least that's my first reaction.

How cool would it be to go back in time and meet someone like Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Genghis Khan? Mind you, none of them spoke English, and all would feel little compunction about having you summarily executed, so maybe that wouldn't be such a great idea. Meeting Leonardo Da Vinci or Socrates or William Shakespeare would be a much safer plan of action. Or maybe some historical sightseeing. I'm willing to bet the Colossus of Rhodes was really impressive, ditto for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (as opposed to any other colossus or hanging gardens, of course).

Then again, what if by going back in time you messed up the future? What if you saved Frederick Barbarossa from drowning while he was en route to Palestine during the Third Crusade? How would that have changed history? What if you ran over Adolf Hitler with a Daimler when he was playing stickball in the street in 1903? (I should point out that I have no idea if Hitler ever played stickball, let alone in the street, but I think the point is obvious.) Let's see, WWII may never have happened, or likely happened much later. Almost certainly the holocaust would not have happened. All the atomic scientists that fled Europe would have stayed, and in all likelihood, Germany would have developed the Bomb sometime around 1950. I don't think that needs any more elaboration.

What if you did something really crazy and taught the Romans how to make gunpowder? At the very least, we'd all be speaking Latin today, and possibly wearing togas. On the other hand, if you took gunpowder to the Carthaginians, I'll bet Hannibal would be a much more common name today.

So maybe going back in time might not be the greatest idea. And let's not forget that so far, there is no possible way to go to the past. But not so for the future.

You're probably thinking that I've got a serious screw loose here. But take a look up at the top of the page, specifically at the title. Cryogenics. For the science-fiction impaired out there, or even the generally science-deprived, cryogenics isn't something I just made up. Cryogenics involves quickly freezing (liquid nitrogen is the preferred coolant) a person or animal, then later reviving them. In this frozen state, one would age at a infinitesimally slow rate. Small animals have been cryogenically frozen and thawed, and survived the process, so it is more than just theoretically possible. As for human beings, well, the theory goes that if someone had a terminal illness, they could be frozen and left in cold storage (yes, that was intentional) until a cure for their particular illness was found. There is a widely held urban legend that Walt Disney's head was cryogenically preserved after he died, on the chance than in the future there would be a cure for heart failure from lung cancer (although in his case I think a cure for being a head without a body would be more the issue), although this is apparently not true.

But setting aside the whole terminal illness issue, one could theoretically choose to be frozen in liquid nitrogen to be awoke 100 years from now. Or 500 years for now. Or 1000. You couldn't go back, of course, unless a method for time travel was discovered, which isn't something to count on. So this would be a way to travel to the future.

There's one glaring problem with traveling to the future that I must point out, however. Imagine the technology existed in 1900 to freeze someone, and someone was indeed frozen and then thawed in the year 2000. Imagine for a minute just how traumatic that would be. In 1900 cars were noisy, slow-moving novelties. In 1900 the only recorded music was likely on a gramophone. Can you imagine how disturbing a portable mp3 player blaring out Rob Zombie would be to someone that has never encountered portable music players or headphones, must less Rob Zombie? Can you imagine how utterly mind blowing it would be to seeThe Matrix or X-Men when the only motion picture you had ever seen was a scratchy black and white silent movie? Even look at fairly mundane stuff, like fax machines. Put in a document, and a minute later there's a copy of it in Seattle. Same thing for cell phones. Want to talk to someone in Hong Kong? Forget that, want to visit Hong Kong? A few hundred bucks and half a day later, and you can be eating very authentic Chinese in Kowloon.

All this is going to be more than mildly hard on the head. We're talking a decade of therapy, more if you happen to be the sort that has trouble adjusting to new things. So even if cryogenics was feasible, it likely wouldn't be worth the trouble.