Credit: SpaceWork Enterprises, Inc
I’ve been practicing and I’m getting pretty good.
You could sleep for two hundred years, travel at fifty thousand miles per hour and still not get close to the nearest star.
Play speeches from dumbocrats
how do they “wake up” from their hibernation? Will somebody be designated to be fully alert and functioning the entire trip, so that he/she can push the button to get everybody up when they approach Mars?
As long as the dimwit that did not consider metric v. SAE measurements in launch trajectory calculations has been fired...I’d say go for it!
As long as the flight personnel are Dem-o-nauts.
Do it on a monkey or a dog first.
EBT card carriers are pretty good at inertia. They might make good candidates.
I don’t think it would be like waking up from a nap, stretching, and getting to work.
I don’t care if you put them in artificial gravity, they are still going to have the muscle atrophy equivalent to someone who was in a coma for 6-9 months when they wake up. What good will astronauts who won’t even be able to walk without weeks of physical therapy do us?
Rather than spending all this time and effort trying to figure out how to induce some kind of creepy, unnatural, torpor-filled state in your crew, how about spending an equal amount of time and effort figuring out how to carry more "precious" air, water and food with you (Hint, hint: Project Orion)? It's only precious because you're not doing that; air, water and food are rather cheap here on Earth. There is no reason they can't be relatively cheap in space too.
As far as I'm concerned torpor, natural or unnatural, isn't something you want in a crew member. If a guy is too dumb to have any curiosity about the natural world, leave him behind. I mean, you can get the entire Library of Congress on a computer chip the size of your thumbnail. That's more than enough material to take anyone from zero to PhD in any subject he chooses. All during a round trip to Pluto! If a guy is disruptive, then bid him night, night. But leave the others alone. I'm sure they'll be able to figure out productive things to do. Life is too short to spend any significant portion of it in a stupor.
Solution: Only send teenagers and launch on Saturday mornings with the admonition that the first one up has to do the dishes. They’ll sleep the entire trip.
Just freeze the thyroid