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.
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.
Sleeper ships in specific works of fiction
- The famous movie and book 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, features a ship travelling to Jupiter (Saturn, in the book) with most of its crew in suspended animation and only a handful remaining awake to operate the spacecraft.
- A sleeper ship named S.S. 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 (the sleep cells are portrayed in every movie except Alien: Resurrection).
- 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 known as the 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 humans leave the earth in 5 sleeper ships to colonise the Sirius Galaxy.
See also
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