Sleeper ship
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A sleeper ship is a hypothetical type of manned spaceship in which most or all of the crew spends the journey in some form of hibernation or suspended animation. As there is currently no known technology that allows for long-term suspended animation of humans, the term is usually only found in science fiction. One alternative may be cryogenic freezing of the crew, though that would not be true suspended animation.
The most common role of sleeper ships in fiction is for interstellar travel, usually at slower-than-light speed. Travel times for such journeys could reach into the hundreds or thousands of years, making some form of life extension such as suspended animation necessary for the original crew to live to see their destination. Suspended animation is also required on ships which cannot be used as generation ships, for whatever reason.
Suspended animation can also be useful to reduce the consumption of life support resources by crewmembers who are not needed during the trip, and for this reason sleeper ships sometimes also make an appearance in the context of purely interplanetary travel.
[edit] Sleeper ships in specific works of fiction
- In Lost In Space, The Robinson family boards a sleeper ship for the long journey to the new world where they will supervise the construction of the other end of a hyperspace tunnel, connecting the new world with Earth and enabling faster than light travel through this shortcut.
- Sleeper ships appear in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and Colonization series, used by the alien Race, and later by humans for interstellar travel. The cryonic technology used is referred to as cold sleep.
- The famous movie and book by Arthur C. Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, features a ship traveling to Jupiter (Saturn, in the book) with most of its crew in suspended animation and only two remaining awake to operate the spacecraft.
- Another Arthur C. Clarke novel to feature sleeper ships was The Songs of Distant Earth.
- A sleeper ship named SS Botany Bay is seen in the Star Trek episode "Space Seed".
- The Nostromo in the film Alien, and the Sulaco in the film Aliens, are sleeper ships, as are all vessels encountered in the Alien franchise, although since space travel in the movies takes only a few weeks or months they do have some faster-than-light capability.
- In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri computer game, the colonists arrive at Alpha Centauri on a sleeper ship.
- In Iain M. Banks' book Excession, a large craft named Sleeper Service is portrayed as an eccentric artificial intelligence which travels from system to system, picking up humans for long term suspended animation and eventual deposit elsewhere (at its discretion).
- In Freelancer computer game, a large group of alliance humans leave earth in five sleeper ships to colonize the Sirius Sector, these ships are named after their patron nations; The Hispania, The Rheinland, The Kusari, The Bretonia and The Liberty.
- In the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, there is a sleeper ship called Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B, which crash-lands on prehistoric Earth.
- In the fictional Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Nicassar make use of sleeper ships called dhows.
- In the 1997 Harland Williams film "RocketMan", the characters make use of a sleeper ship for their journey to Mars.
- In the Halo game series all non-mandatory personnel are put into Cryo-Tubes during Slip-Space travel.
- In the Terran storyline for StarCraft, a computer game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, humans colonized the Koprulu Sector by an experiment sponsored by a rogue researcher who launched tens of thousands of persecuted modified humans targeted for extermination into space. Although they were intended to colonize in a different star system, their navigational computers failed, sending their ships careening towards the nethers of the galaxy until they crash landed on a few habitable planets.
- The Larry Niven-Jerry Pournelle novel Footfall tells of an alien race called the Fithp who use a combination sleeper/generation ship to reach our solar system, resulting in two distinct generations of Fithp; the elder Sleepers (those born before the trip began) and the Spaceborn, a new generation born after the ship first arrived in the solar system.
- In Larry Niven's Known Space series, most planets were colonized by sleeper ship, since near-lightspeed ramjets exposed the payload to radiation levels too high for human life. A number of planets unsuitable for colonization were selected as sleeper ship destinations due to incorrect programming of the pathfinder ramjet robots. The earliest model sleeper ships used cryogenic suspension, but after the discovery of the Thrint stasis field the sleeper ships used that technology. Eventually, humanity acquires hyperdrive technology from an exotic race called the Outsiders, and both ramjets and sleeper ships fall into immediate disuse.
- In A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, interstellar traders called the Qeng Ho use sub-lightspeed spacecraft to trade with other human-inhabited planets. A part of the ship crew is always in hibernation, though never everyone. The ships don't carry any artificial intelligence. They do, however, have elaborate programming on their ships, which is frequently debated by the characters. Only at grand occasions most crewmembers are awakened. In the same book an intelligent spider-like species live on the only planet that rotates around a sun which periodically goes on and off like a light bulb. The sun is poetically called "OnOff". When the sun goes "Off", the planet , including all its inhabitants, freeze. When the sun goes back "On", the planet and its inhabitants thaw and continue about their business.
- In Trigun, Earth has become uninhabitable and all humans have been placed in a fleet of huge sleeper ships to find a new homeplanet. When they arrived at the desert planet Gunsmoke, the protagonist's twin crashed all ships into the surface, with only several "load's" remaining. The reason for this was that the humans were using their brethren as power generators. In a later episode (Out Of Time) it is revealed that one ship is still afloat above a storm, with it's hull barely intact after 150 years. The ship is ultimately crashed after half of the generators were "killed".
- The back story of the cartoon series Thundercats involves the protagonists fleeing the dying planet Thundera in a sleeper ship.
- The back story of the Honor Harrington book series involves the use of sleeper ships for several centuries in the colonization of interstellar space, until technology is developed which makes the use of hyperspace for said purpose feasible (and safe!). In fact, the Star Kingdom of Manticore is originally settled by said means.
- In an episode of the television series News Radio, the staff is put into suspended animation on a sleeper ship; but are killed seconds later.
