: Er, time dilation work exactly the same as suspended animation, as far as
: time-relevant effects go. If you had a magic spaceship that could
: instantly jump to .999_ c, but there was no time dilation, but you had
: perfect suspended animation (and say the whole cockpit was your stasis
: pod, for simplicity of illustration), you would set your ship's
: trajectory/coordinates/autopilot, hit "go", be suspended, and
: "instantly" wake up x light years away, slightly more than x
: years later to the outside world. On the other hand, if you had such a
: ship and there *was* time dilation (as there is in the real world), you
: wouldn't have to bother with the suspended animation, as you would set
: your ship's trajectory/coordinates/autopilot, hit "go", time on
: the ship would stop while you travelled, and so "instantly"
: you'd find yourself x light years away, slightly more than x years later
: to the outside world.
: In fact, my favorite scifi stasis method just is artificially induced
: temporal dilation, like the Slaver stasis fields used in Larry Niven's
: Known Space universe. If your ship has a stasis field, if you ever take
: serious damage the whole ship is instantly frozen in time, and thus
: impervious to change and thus damage, until the danger passes. From the
: inside, you're cruising along and suddenly "whoa the stars changed,
: what hit us? Where are we?" There's a great example of this in one of
: the Ringworld books, can't recall which at the moment...
Hm...I was actually refering to time in nomral space. That is, in rushing to get to the scene of a battle, you have to factor in time dilation and that, as far as the battle participants are aware, you're taking a heck of a long time to get there. ^_^
The main difference between that and going into cryo-sleep is that time dilation isn't an instentaneous process. That is, since you're still going slower than the speed of light, it takes a while (in the "stationary" universe) for you to get places, and you're still going to have awareness of the passage of time unless you get infinately close to the speed of light itself, similar to (or the same phenomena...) the time dilation effect of nearing the event horizon of a black hole. It could be said that time passes in the black hole, just in the time it would take you to turn around and travel back across the event horizon back into normal space, the entire age of the universe would have gone by, thus why it is said that things going into a black hole cannot ever come out. They aren't "stuck" or "trapped" in there by gravity, as many would suggest (indeed, to escape a black hole, all you would need is a force capable of being SLIGHTLY greater than the pull of the gravity, and pointing you in the opposite direction), but rather you're trapped simply because the universe will live and die of old age before you can make a U-turn and get out. It's interesting that no one seems to get that; you aren't trapped by gravity, but rather by time. Though I guess they are equivalent phenomena, and in the end, produce identical results for all practical purposes.
I'm not quite sure that the idea of using that as a method for invunerability is feasable, though, but it makes good sci-fi. ^_^
