Space Travel (part 2)

What if we really are confined to using ion propulsion or gravitational slingshotting? Obviously, this would seem a dead end because no one would live long enough to experience more than a very small fraction of the journey. Perhaps that is the problem itself, so why not sleep through the entire trip? Cryo-sleep, hyper-sleep, stasis, or suspended animation are sci-fi terms used to describe the concept of slowing down the body to a near-death state, only to resuscitate and restore full functionality at a later date. Currently, experiments are already being performed for medical science, and doctors term “suspended animation” as “emergency preservation and resuscitation.” Basically, the patient's blood is replaced by a cold saline which stops most cellular activity. The body is later thawed by replacing the saline with blood again. So far, this has been successfully tested on pigs and it will soon be tested on 10 human patients that have suffered cardiac arrest due to a traumatic injury. If it works and if the period of suspension can be increased far beyond the current 2 hours, we might be looking at the possibility of interstellar travel. Of course, it's quite possible the space travelers might wake up 19,000 years in the future as the only remnants of the human race!

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/179296-humans-will-be-kept-between-life-and-death-in-the-first-suspended-animation-trials