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Culture: Literature
Personal Suspended-Animation Device   (+1, -1)  [vote for, against]
sci-fi/future plot device.

The PSAC halts time and/or body processes for the user for a user-preset amount of time with no or very little preparation or postprocessing. While expensive, every family/individual has at least one.

Among the many uses...
- allow new parent(s) to get some rest,
- jet lag, shiftworkers, heavy partiers resynching of sleep cycle,
- boredom relief.

It is noted of course, that suspended-animation is already in use in stories for interstellar travel, long-term one-way time-travel, and food storage. This idea is for a device that has the same penetration into society as the television or personal-computer, and that its usage is considered mundane: "Hello, you have reached Shazbot at 344-222-111111-4444-338461-396764. I'm in the tank right now and can't take your call, but if you'd like to leave a message..."
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 25 2011

How would it allow rest? Rest is not just the absence of action, but usually includes some kind of recovery.
-- pocmloc, Nov 25 2011


This is excellent. If you can give some clue as to how it works, you'd be well on the way to having an idea.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 25 2011


//How would it allow rest?// You put the kids in it. The downside is it might take 27 years for the offspring to reach the biological age of 12.
-- AusCan531, Nov 25 2011


// The downside is it might take 27 years for the offspring to reach the biological age of 12. //

The upside is you can leave them there indefinitely.
-- 8th of 7, Nov 25 2011


//allow rest// it doesn't, what [AC] said.

//how// No reference: it might be some sort of freezing, or time-dilation or whatever. I vote for superluminal neutrons personally.

For the first while of a child's life when it's eating sleeping puking crapping screaming without any reference to circadian rhythm, it allows the parents to occasionally (or all the time for that matter) get a good night's rest.

If your life consists of TV simply because there's nothing else to do, shave an hour off each day until there is something worthwhile.

Work downtown and able to afford your own rickshaw driver ? There's a couple commuting hours saved from staring off into space on the subway or fighting traffic.

Airline personnel can do layovers across timezones. Swingshift workers can simply drop into the box for 8 or 16 hours. Both without the blurry eyes that usually accompany (at least) the first day on the new shift/timezone.

For that matter airlines can use it in at least one direction of travel to eliminate jetlag completely for their passengers... who are also quieter on the flight.

Teachers facing a long summer, if they can afford the time off, can just take a couple weeks hols then plunk, into the box for a couple months.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 26 2011


ha! airlines could have box-flights that only travel west to east, all the way'round the world. Supermodels could freeze between shoots and extend their youthtime.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 26 2011


You could write it as a murder mystery. (This is assuming the device is some sort of canister-like thing) A guy dies when his PSAC turns off because there's a bullet frozen in time shot at him. The enigma is that it had to have been a suicide because the PSAC is closed and unbroken and it would be impossible for anyone to close the door on a moving bullet.
-- Alizayi, Nov 26 2011


hmmm, would suspended animation for shorter periods of time keep you from needing sleep, or would that down-time just be transmitted to later?
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Nov 26 2011


It could mess with your sleep cycle... or it could unmess your sleep cycle. The effect of the device would be simplest described as simply stepping into a container then immediately stepping out again... I guess it'd dependon how the process was accomplished.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 26 2011


Been written, at least in a first pass form. Pretty sure the author was Spider Robinson, although I'm away from my library and can't look it up. A short story where a beleaugered housewife helps out a stranded alien and gets, among other things, a device which is able to pause people, including her husband and kids for exactly the first purpose.
-- MechE, Nov 26 2011


That's Callahan's Place author, right?
-- Alizayi, Nov 27 2011


Robinson is the Callahan author, but as it happens, I was mis-remembering. The story is "Barter" by Lois McMaster Bujold, 1985 original printing (unknown where), reprinted in the anthology Dreamweavers Dillema.
-- MechE, Nov 27 2011


Anybody else annoyed at R's tendency to write a good read for 400 pages, then tank it with "then they all got stoned, shared minds and solved the problem" in the last 2 pages ?
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 27 2011


Another use for this device (relief of overcrowding) was proposed by PJ Farmer in "The sliced crosswise, only on Tuesday world."
-- mouseposture, Nov 27 2011


//The sliced crosswise, only on Tuesday world.//. THATs the story name I was trying to remember. Thanks [mouseposture]
-- AusCan531, Nov 27 2011


I wish there were a Halfbakery for ideas based upon the existence of some particular technological advancement.

Like if we had access to another dimension that gave everyone in the world their own habitable planet. Or access to storage on a flat, endless, featureless plane.

Or what if we could send objects back into time? Caked on gunk? Soaking that glass casserole dish for 150 years ought to do it.

Of if we had unbreakable cable, could we string cables down from a huge geostationary rock and store energy in orbiting horseshoes that would grab the string and swig things up into space.

One guy and only one guy understands how to make an antigravity device, and commences to mess with people, that kind of thing.
-- nomocrow, Nov 28 2011



random, halfbakery