History Main / SleeperStarship

* The 2016 film ''[[Film/Passengers2016 Passengers]]'' is set on a starship making a 120-year journey, with automated robots running things and all the humans in hibernation. Problem is, for some reason, two people wake up 90 years early and can't get their pods to work again.

* An episode of ''Series/BabylonFive'' involved a ship sent from Earth shortly before FirstContact (and use of FTL) with a married couple in stasis chambers. Unfortunately, only the woman survives. Her husband is dead, but not due to a malfunction. Actually, [[spoiler:he is "eaten" by an EldritchAbomination that hitched a ride on the ship]].

* ''Franchise/StarTrek''
** ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "Space Seed". The ''Enterprise'' encounters the S.S. ''Botany Bay'', a "sleeper ship" with seventy-two people in suspended animation. They turn out to be genetic supermen from the period of the Eugenics Wars on Earth.
*** It also explained why Khan was older than the others. As leader, he would have spent less time in the freezer tubes than his followers.
** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' followed up on this with another spacecraft discovered by the crew of the ''Enterprise''-D in the 24th century. This was a primitive "cryosatellite" or "capsule" of roughly late 20th or early 21st-century technology containing a vault with cryotubes. Several were empty, at least one experienced a [[CryonicsFailure cryo-failure]], and three contained [[HumanPopsicle human popsicles]], although unlike Khan and his followers, these were regular old un-augmented 20th-century human beings who had died of natural causes and had been put in cryo-stasis so their bodies would not decay, with the hope their condition could be reversed with more advanced medicine in the future. It works, but it's still a mystery how an orbital satellite with very limited propulsion wound up hundreds of lightyears from the Sol System.
* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'' episode "The Long Morrow". An astronaut will be in frozen suspended animation during his forty-year trip to a distant star and return.

* ''Series/LostInSpace''. The Robinsons were supposed to spend the trip to Alpha Centauri inside the Jupiter 2's suspended animation "freezing tubes"
* ''Series/BattlestarGalactica1978'' The fleet comes upon a ship carrying 2 families (a father and his kids, a mother and her kids but the adults aren't a couple). The fleet nearly kills the father, by waking him up. The atmosphere on the Galactica is too heavy for him. They are escaping from a colony, where none of the people born can return to their home world which is divided into east (USSR) and west (US) because they can't survive in the atmosphere.
* ''Series/BlakesSeven''. The seedship version is encountered in "Time Squad" and "Deliverance".

* Used extensively in the setting of {{Series/Earth2}}; for decades-long interstellar trips like the main cast's journey from Earth to G889, for relatively short-duration trips within the solar system, and for medical purposes. This is despite repeatedly undergoing the cold sleep procedure causing brain damage, which happened to one of the main characters as part of his backstory (it also accidentally [[spoiler:made him receptive to the alien Terrians' telepathy]]).

** The parody song "Compound Interest" has the astronauts investing their money in developing FasterThanLightTravel before setting out, so when they wake up they own most of colonized space.

* ''WesternAnimation/StarTrekLowerDecks'': In "[[Recap/StarTrekLowerDecksS1E04MoistVessel Moist Vessel]]", despite being called a "generation ship," the stranded alien vessel has all its passengers "mummified" in SuspendedAnimation capsules.

[[folder:ComicBooks]]

* The ''Comicbook/GuardiansOfTheGalaxy'' character Vance Astro spent 1,000 years in suspended animation for a slower-than-light trip to Alpha Centauri... Only to find Earthmen had invented hyperdrive and beaten him there by several centuries. (However, they did throw him a welcoming party.) As a bonus bummer, the long time he spent in the tube has damaged his body so that he needed a full-body life-support suit to survive.

* The Elysium in ''Film/{{Pandorum}}'' features a model of pod who combinates a hypersleep chamber and an EscapePod, and it seems to have its user contained in an artificial skin aside from the classic liquid.

* ''Film/{{Moon}}'' (2009). A hibernation chamber is used by the solitary moonbase operator for the three day trip back to Earth. [[spoiler:It turns out to be an incineration chamber, as each operator is a clone who gets destroyed after CloneDegeneration sets in, and replaced by another clone with FakeMemories.]]

* ''Film/PitchBlack'' begins with the crew and passengers on a long-distance ship in hibernation. In a bit of unusual flair with the concept, the AntiHero (and narrator) Riddick is awake in his pod, and introducing the rest of the cast by smell.
* ''Film/{{Outland}}''. It takes a year to travel from the mining colony on Io (a moon of Jupiter) back to Earth, so the travellers are put into cold sleep. At the end of the movie the hero tells his wife that he's looking forward to sleeping with her for an entire year.
* In ''Film/EventHorizon'', the crew of the rescue ships are kept in stasis in pods during the trip, though not for the usual reason: it is designed to palliate the lack of InertialDampening. When the ship accelerates, any human not in a fluid-filled pod will be squished into fine red paste. It's not clear how this acceleration affects other items in the ship, however.
* In ''Film/RocketMan1997'' chambers are again used to conserve food and air on both the trip to Mars and the return trip. However, the protagonist is impeded from entering his both times.
** A simple design adjustment would avoid this: simply make all 4 pods have identical sizes instead of having 3 human-sized ones and one for a [[ChimpsInSpace monkey]] (and yes, the monkey ends up stealing the main character's pod both times).

* The 2016 film ''[[Film/Passengers2016 Passengers]]'' is set on a starship making a 120-year journey, with automated robots running things and all the humans in hibernation. Problem is, for some reason two people wake up 90 years early and can't get their pods to work again.
* Non-scifi variant: In ''Film/{{Noah}}'', the paired animals are drugged with herbal smoke to place them into a hibernation-like state, thus allowing the Ark to safely carry them for months without need for animal-fodder, water, or attention.

** In ''Literature/TheRollingStones1952'', when the twins Castor and Pollux Stone suggest making money on the family's vacation voyage to the Asteroid Belt by taking along a few AsteroidMiners in hibernation, their father vetoes it, pointing out that (in this novel's setting) only about seven in ten cold-sleep passengers will survive a lengthy voyage.

* Creator/RogerZelazny's ''Isle Of The Dead'' is about a 20th-century Earthman who signs up as one of the first space explorers before humans have light speed. Everything has to be in sleeper ships and it takes 40-80 years to get to the planet. He does this several times. When FTL travel is made practical, it causes colossal changes throughout the galaxy, let alone Earth. Our hero is now the oldest living human, feels he doesn't belong anywhere, and goes to the longest-lived race in the galaxy to see how they live their thousand-year lives -- and thereby hangs the tale.

* In ''Literature/ThePentagonWar'', humans use "submetabolic sleep" technology to endure the years-long trips between star systems. Alpha Centaurians are cold blooded creatures who naturally hibernate when the temperature falls below 5 degrees C, so the only cryonic technology they need for interstellar voyages are refrigerators.

* In Creator/WilliamShatner's Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse novels, this is how Emperor Tiberius I (Kirk's EvilCounterpart in the MirrorUniverse) survives to the post-TNG era, while Kirk is stuck in the Nexus. After leading the Cardassian-Klingon Alliance against his former Terran Empire, he realizes he has [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness outlived his usefulness]] and flees before the Cardassians and the Klingons can dispose of him on a ship with cryopods. Naturally, he only planned to "sleep" for a year before trying to retake his "rightful" place as Emperor, but the wake-up system failed, and the ship was adrift until about a year before the novels take place, when a Mirror!Klingon ship finds him. The Klingons immediately recognize him and plan for him to stand trial and be executed, but Tiberius manages to seduce a female Klingon and (after killing her), escape and enact his plan into motion.
* The Souls from ''Literature/TheHost2008'' go into suspended animation when traveling between worlds, since the trip can take up to a century.

* ''Literature/TheWorthingSaga'' uses a variant in which people lose all of their memories while in stasis, so their brains need to be scanned in advance, so their personalities can be re-uploaded when they wake. This leads to a situation on which, due to a collision, 112 colonists are technically alive, but only two of them have surviving memories. The remaining colonists are essentially newborns in adult bodies when they wake up, and have to relearn everything in order to function.

* ''Undertow'' by Creator/ElizabethBear had galactic society that used Schrodinger's Uncertainty Principle to teleport goods and information instantly between planets. However, living creatures like humans that went through the process wound up dead on the other side due to collapsing the wave function. As such, transporting people from planet to planet requires slower-than-light ships and cryonics.

** ''Isle Of The Dead'' is about a 20th-century Earthman who signs up as one of the first space explorers before humans have light speed. Everything has to be in sleeper ships and it takes 40-80 years to get to the planet. He does this several times. When FTL travel is made practical, it causes colossal changes throughout the galaxy, let alone Earth. Our hero is now the oldest living human, feels he doesn't belong anywhere, and goes to the longest-lived race in the galaxy to see how they live their thousand-year lives -- and thereby hangs the tale.
* In ''Literature/LordOfLight'', the fact that the colonists were all shipped through interstellar space as human popsicles is offered as the explanation for why they didn't develop mutant super-powers when the ship's crew did.
* ''Literature/AuroraCycle'': Most people undertake Fold journeys frozen, because it has negative effects on conscious minds. Anyone over 25 ''has'' to travel in cryo, while younger people will be okay, but need to be in cryo if the journey is long enough. Auri O'Malley becomes a FishOutOfTemporalWater when the colony ship she was travelling on was lost in the Fold for 220 years until her rescue at the beginning, with herself as the only survivor.

** The books explain that about a century before the series start there was interest in interstellar travel so ships built then (like the ''Dwarf'') had stasis booths. But every SleeperStarship that was sent out found no habitable worlds and no sign of life in any solar system they had the delta-V to reach, and by the time of ''Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers'' humanity had given it up as a waste of time and money. [[spoiler:Until they came up with a method of FasterThanLightTravel, anyway.]]

** ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "Space Seed". The ''Enterprise'' encounters the S.S. ''Botany Bay'', a "sleeper ship" with seventy two people in suspended animation. They turn out to be genetic supermen from the period of the Eugenics Wars on Earth.

** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' followed up on this with another spacecraft discovered by the crew of the ''Enterprise''-D in the 24th century. This was a primitive "cryosatellite" or "capsule" of roughly late 20th or early 21st century technology containing a vault with cryotubes. Several were empty, at least one experienced a [[CryonicsFailure cryo-failure]], and three contained [[HumanPopsicle human popsicles]], although unlike Khan and his followers, these were regular old un-augmented 20th century human beings who had died of natural causes and had been put in cryo-statis so their bodies would not decay, with the hope their condition could be reversed with more advanced medicine in the future. It works, but it's still a mystery how an orbital satellite with very limited propulsion wound up hundreds of lightyears from the Sol System.
* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'' episode "The Long Morrow". An astronaut will be in frozen suspended animation during his forty year trip to a distant star and return.

* ''Series/BattlestarGalactica1978'' The fleet comes upon a ship carrying 2 families (a father and his kids, a mother her kids but the adults aren't a couple). The fleet nearly kills the father, by waking him up. The atmosphere on the Galactica is too heavy for him. They are escaping from a colony, where none of the people born can return to their home world which is divided into east (USSR) and west (US) because they can't survive in the atmosphere.

* In Creator/TheBBC series ''Radio/{{Earthsearch}}'' and ''Earthsearch II'', relativity is never violated, as interstellar travel is only possible due to suspended animation. However the starship the protagonists use was also designed as a GenerationShip because every year as a HumanPopsicle means they age a month.

** In ''Frozen in Time'', Jet, Lemmy, Doc and Mitch were placed in the suspended animation pods of ''Ares'' on May 10, 1977. Pod 4, containing Jet, failed after several weeks. As such, Jet was forced to operate the ship alone for almost 36 years until the other three crewmembers were revived on March 9, 2013.

** Adventure 3 ''Trillion Credit Squadron''. Before the development of the jump drive cold sleep was used to settle far off solar systems. The Island Clusters subsectors were settled by three colonization ships, each carrying 100,000 colonists in cold sleep.

* In ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'', the Human colonies in Planet come from a big spaceship, the ''U.N.S. Unity'', sent by the United Nations to build a colony in another planet, filled with thousands of cryogenically frozen people.

* The titular ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' colony ship is a generational ship. The Martian moon Deimos was converted into the ''Marathon'' and sent on a 300 year journey to Tau Ceti. While there were a few crew members "wake" during the trip, most of them were in suspended animation.

** The backstory for the ''Cataclysm'' expansion pack states that those who were awakened on Hiigara from those pods found themselves at a disadvantage. Those who fought the Taiidani claimed higher status than those who merely slept. This kicks off the main plot when a small clan tries to strike out on its own among the stars. The manual also touches on their reaction to learning that EverybodysDeadDave; many were DrivenToSuicide. One particular Hiigaran was one of only two members of his small kiith who made the cut (the other was his wife). When he was awakened at Hiigara, he discovered that, not only was his entire kiith wiped out, when the Taiidani destroyed Kharak, but his wife was also killed when the remaining Taiidani ships opened fire on the cryo-pods. Instead of committing suicide, he demanded and was given a small frigate, crewed by others who have been likewise hurt by the Taiidani, who became honorary members of his kiith. The manual claims that the man became one of the most prolific bounty hunters, going after many of the Taiidani war criminals.
* ''Videogame/AlienLegacy'' starts with the seedship UNS ''Calypso'' arriving to the Beta Caeli system after traveling for many thousands of years (according to some calculations). The crew has been on ice this whole time. You start with only a small portion of the colonists with the remaining ones still frozen due to lack of livable space and resources. As you build up your planetside colonies and ship colonists from the ''Calypso'', more are awoken. A random even may happen that will kill the still-frozen colonists due to a malfunction if you're too slow in waking them up. Imagine the colonists' surprise when they found out that another seedship (launched 16 years later) beat them to the punch by 21 years thanks to advances in fusion.

* ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'' stars the crew of one, arriving in the Andromeda galaxy after a generations-long trip. The original trilogy never needed this, as mass relays allow rapid intragalactic transportation but don't exist outside the Milky Way. In fact, the player arrives on one of four such ships, one from each major Citadel Council race: asari, salarian, turian, human, with an occasional minor race representative thrown in (there's a krogan crew member). The ships were sent out shortly after ''Mass Effect 2'' (i.e. prior to the [[spoiler:Reaper invasion]]) and have traveled for 600 years. Upon arriving, the crew finds that their ship has been thrown off-course and must now try to locate the other three ships and the Nexus, a Citadel-like hub station sent ahead of the ships. The ending of the original trilogy remains deliberately unknown, separated from the new setting in both time (600 years) and space (over 2 million light-years). Discussion is made that there was plans for a fifth ark, helmed by the quarians (and also including drell, volus, elcor and hanar), but with the technical problems of accomadating those species on one ship, no-one's sure whether it'll turn up or not. It's not until after the end of the game that it turns out it does exist. Also, in a side-mission, it turns out the kett, who lack the PortalNetwork of the mass relays, also use these to get about Andromeda.

** Cold sleep is necessary for both STL and FTL travel. Largely because the D.A.V.E. drive works by altering time flow so that decades pass on board while weeks pass planetside. Unfortunately the drugs involved take such a toll on the body that it takes seven to eight years to recover afterwards.

* ''WesternAnimation/AquaTeenHungerForce'': In "Spacecadeuce", Emory and Oglethorpe are supposed to be in 'hypersleep' stasis. While Emory is sleeping like a log, Oglethorpe is too afraid to sleep, and ends up with an alien trying to get into his pod for ''months'' until hypersleep was over.

* In Creator/RobertAHeinlein's ''Literature/MethuselahsChildren'' the ''New Frontiers'' was part sleeper part relativistic due to the thousands of people on board.
* Heinlein also used the idea of "cold-sleep" as an optional way of shortening the long, boring months needed for a realistic interplanetary voyage. In ''Literature/BetweenPlanets'', the passengers on an interplanetary liner bound for Venus argue about whether to sign up for hibernation; the only apparent drawback (and the subject of an explicitly unanswerable bunk-room debate) is whether or not cold-sleep "stops the clock" on whatever lifespan you otherwise could have expected to have, or if it means that you miss out on that much of your allotted lifetime by spending it as a frozen quasi-corpse.
* But in ''Literature/TheRollingStones1952'', when the teenage twins want to make money on the family's vacation voyage to the Asteroid Belt by taking along a few AsteroidMiners in hibernation, their father vetoes it, pointing out that (in this novel's setting) only about seven in ten cold-sleep passengers will survive a lengthy voyage.

* Also by Niven, ''The Legacy of Heorot'' and ''Beowulf's Children'' (co-written with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes), with a crew of interstellar colonists who discover too late the drawbacks of the freezing process they used, with the colonists suffering various forms of brain damage.

* ''The Legacy of Heorot''. The Earth colonists aboard the starship Geographic are kept in frozen suspended animation for the trip. Unfortunately, being frozen and thawed (which happened repeatedly) caused brain damage, which the colonists' children called "ice on their minds".

* In the ''WesternAnimation/AquaTeenHungerForce'' episode "Spacecadeuce" Emory and Oglethorpe are supposed to be in 'hypersleep' stasis. While Emory is sleeping like a log, Oglethorpe is too afraid to sleep, and ends up with an alien trying to get into his pod for ''months'' until hypersleep was over.

* ''WesternAnimation/BeastWars'' has most of the crew of the ''Axalon'' in stasis. When it looks like it's going to crash, [[TheHero Optimus Primal]] [[EscapePod ejects the stasis pods]] in hopes that the sleeping crew would at least survive. [[spoiler:A few do and make planetfall to join the war, but the majority are destroyed after the Season 1 finale, killed and knocked out of orbit by the alien superweapon or the Quantum Surge caused by its destruction]].
** Happens in ''WesternAnimation/TransformersCyberverse'' when the ''Ark'' begins to run low on Energon during its search for the Allspark. Optimus orders all Autobots into stasis while the ship's computers take over the search.
* In ''[[WesternAnimation/IlEtaitUneFois Once upon a Time... Space]]'' -- set in an [[TheFederation intergalactic federation]] that includes mankind -- the first interstellar spaceship from Earth was of this kind. [[LostColony Believed lost]] for nearly a millennium by the start of the series, said spaceship arrives unannounced to its destination -- smack in the middle of Federation space -- and the [[HumanPopsicle recently reawakened crew]] finds out that the cosmos was colonized by [[LightspeedLeapfrog much faster ships]], and their thousand-year journey now takes about a week.

* Found in the ''Remnants'' series by K.A. Applegate. In an attempt to survive the impending destruction of Earth, people get onto a large spaceship and shoot blindly into space. In order to live as long as it takes to find a habitable planet, they enter a stasis of some sort. However, in a few characters' cases, it doesn't work out as planned. Specifically: Two-thirds of the passengers die outright from CryonicsFailure. One character remains conscious while frozen, thus being paralyzed and deprived of sensory input for five hundred years, which causes temporary catatonia and permanent brain-rearrangement upon revival. Another character, who was pregnant, gestates extremely slowly and gives birth, while still in stasis, to a NightmareFuel mutant baby with no eyes and a PsychicLink to its mother, among other things. It, too, grows extremely slowly while in stasis, ending up around two-ish physically when everyone gets unfrozen.

* Since Creator/JanuszZajdel was a physicist and knew a couple of things about relativity, his non-comedic stories feature these as the only means of large distance space travel.

* But in ''Literature/TheRollingStones'', when the teenage twins want to make money on the family's vacation voyage to the Asteroid Belt by taking along a few AsteroidMiners in hibernation, their father vetoes it, pointing out that (in this novel's setting) only about seven in ten cold-sleep passengers will survive a lengthy voyage.

* When planning a mission to Mars in ''ComicStrip/SafeHavens'', Samantha considers this option to save on supplies and boredom. She also considers the idea of, instead of using any sort of technology to do that, just transforming the whole crew into bears and entering hibernation. (In the end it was concluded that it was actually cheaper just to install [=WiFi=] on board the ship to keep the crew entertained.)

** Marvel's ''ComicBook/{{Micronauts}}'' basically cannibalized this figment of Astro's backstory and gave it to Arcturus Rann. Like Astro, he went into stasis for most of a space voyage only to find that the rest of the universe (well, Microverse) had discovered warp travel while he slept.

* * The titular ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' colony ship is a generational ship. The Martian moon Deimos was converted into the ''Marathon'' and sent on a 300 year journey to Tau Ceti. While there were a few crew members "wake" during the trip, most of them were in suspended animation.

A modern variation that is becoming popular is one where the passengers just [[BrainUploading upload their brains]] into the ship's computers and are drownloaded into cloned bodies when they reach their destination. An older variant -- a cross between a sleeper ship and a generation ship -- is the "seed ship", which carries frozen embryos instead of frozen adults to save weight. The problems involved in rearing a generation of newborns without live parents are left as an exercise for the author.

A modern variation that is becoming popular is one where the passengers just [[BrainUploading upload their brains]] into the ship's computers and are downloaded into cloned bodies when they reach their destination. An older variant -- a cross between a sleeper ship and a generation ship -- is the "seed ship", which carries frozen embryos instead of frozen adults to save weight. The problems involved in rearing a generation of newborns without live parents are left as an exercise for the author.

* In ''Film/RocketMan'' chambers are again used to conserve food and air on both the trip to Mars and the return trip. However, the protagonist is impeded from entering his both times.

* The ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' series has these, though transit times suggest FTL, so it probably is used to avoid the effects of a possible TimeDilation which would slow the time inside the ship while the universe sees it jump.
** In the prequel movies, stasis pods are shown being used on earlier slower interstellar spaceships like the ''Covenant''.

* The cryosleep variety is used in ''Film/{{Avatar}}'' with the [[MegaCorp RDA]]'s Interstellar Vessels. Even at the phenomenal speed afforded by their [[{{Antimatter}} matter-antimatter]] engines - 70 percent the speed of light - the journey from Earth to Pandora's solar system, Alpha Centauri, still takes over five years.

* ''Film/PitchBlack'' begns with the crew and passengers on a long-distance ship in hibernation. In a bit of unusual flair with the concept, the AntiHero (and narrator) Riddick is awake in his pod, and introducing the rest of the cast by smell.

** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' followed up on this with another spacecraft discovered by the crew of the Enterprise-D in the 24th century. This was a primitive "cryosatellite" or "capsule" of roughly late 20th or early 21st century technology containing a vault with cryotubes. Several were empty, at least one experienced a [[CryonicsFailure cryo-failure]], and three contained [[HumanPopsicle human popsicles]], although unlike Khan and his followers, these were regular old un-augmented 20th century human beings who had died of natural causes and had been put in cryo-statis so their bodies would not decay, with the hope their condition could be reversed with more advanced medicine in the future. It works, but it's still a mystery how an orbital satellite with very limited propulsion wound up hundreds of lightyears from the Sol System.

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "Space Seed". The Enterprise encounters the S.S. Botany Bay, a "sleeper ship" with seventy two people in suspended animation. They turn out to be genetic supermen from the period of the Eugenics Wars on Earth.
** It also explained why Khan was older than the others. As leader, he would have spent less time in the freezer tubes than his followers.
* ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' followed up on this with another spacecraft discovered by the crew of the Enterprise-D in the 24th century. This was a primitive "cryosatellite" or "capsule" of roughly late 20th or early 21st century technology containing a vault with cryotubes. Several were empty, at least one experienced a [[CryonicsFailure cryo-failure]], and three contained [[HumanPopsicle human popsicles]], although unlike Khan and his followers, these were regular old un-augmented 20th century human beings who had died of natural causes and had been put in cryo-statis so their bodies would not decay, with the hope their condition could be reversed with more advanced medicine in the future. It works, but it's still a mystery how an orbital satellite with very limited propulsion wound up hundreds of lightyears from the Sol System.