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[Parsely]

When you thaw those people you're still going to have to retrain them if they've been in stasis for more than a few years, which means they wouldn't be worth any more than a regular recruit. Why not just use those people who are willing to sign up right now instead of later? Not to mention how expensive that would be to store enough "soldiers" to make a difference in a war.

[Amperzand]

A major difficulty with cryostasis is that you can't actually freeze a normally configured human being and wake them back up. When somebody is entirely frozen, ice crystals form in their cells, which kills the cells. What you have to do is bring them down to an extremely low temperature without actually freezing them, which slows down chemical reactions and prevents decay from various causes.

Additionally, you can't store somebody like that indefinitely, for many reasons, the longest-term of which being that they can't heal the standard genetic and cellular damage caused by background radiation while frozen. Basically, if you leave someone stasized for fifty years and thaw them out, they suddenly have to deal with fifty years of normal radiation damage all at once.

[Tack]

A major difficulty with cryostasis is that you can't actually freeze a normally configured human being and wake them back up. When somebody is entirely frozen, ice crystals form in their cells, which kills the cells.

This basically. Once your cells freeze, they rupture.
Which is damage that we really just cannot fix.1

[Amperzand]

Yep.

The one major way we've tried and gotten to work is saturating the organism in question with an antifreeze solution, usually Glycerol, I believe. The goal is low temperature, not actual freezing, so if you lower the freezing point of the water involved, you can make it work, at least in theory. Prolonged stasis is probably still not viable.

[Fniff]

Cryogenics isn't the best idea. Only a slim minority of soldiers would throw their lives away like that and then you have all the practical problems mentioned earlier.

What could be done instead is that each soldier has a voluntary brain-scan at the end of their deployment. This scan is stored in a facility and lives out their life in a virtual space. Then when the enemy invades and duty calls they are placed in a combat robot to fight the enemy. When the war is over, they are placed back in the virtual space.

Boom. An entirely voluntary procedure with no loss on the soldier's part that results in a trained fighting force. You could even sell it as one of the benefits of joining the army: after all, it's (technically) immortality. A perfect system, provided you can ignore the unsettling implications.

[Sheb]

What if cryogenics exist, but is very expensive or otherwise limited? I'm sure plenty of people would love to spend some time in suspended animation and see what the future is like. Then, the government could have a deal "We will keep you in storage for x years for free, but in case of need, you agree that we can thaw you and conscript you."

[iceball3]

What if cryogenics exist, but is very expensive or otherwise limited? I'm sure plenty of people would love to spend some time in suspended animation and see what the future is like. Then, the government could have a deal "We will keep you in storage for x years for free, but in case of need, you agree that we can thaw you and conscript you."

[Tuxfanturnip]

Sorry to get off topic (back topic?) but there's a bit of an issue with fighter jets on Venus.... No oxidizer. A significant proportion of a jet's fuel and propellant are free on Earth... But barring really volatile and impractical fuels or one-man nuclear thermal jets, jets per se don't really work on Venus.

You'd probably end up with electric propeller planes, perhaps outfitted with booster rockets. Nothing would break the sound barrier except some expensive private rocket transports.

[chaotic skies]

The main problem that I could see with Cryogenics that we just can't solve is the culture shock of suddenly skipping forward x amount of years. We might eventually get nanobots that can heal people during crystasis, and if we're being theoretical, let's say we eventually figure out the brain, and install a computer of some kind into everyone that's frozen and just have them download info on the new stuff. We still wouldn't be able to fix the problem of culture shock, no matter what we download, because a large part of human culture is being a part of said culture. I'm sure you might end up with people who do this enough times to get "used" to the culture shock, but you still wouldn't be able to mix them in with the newer recruits, or even the old ones after a while.

[Rolepgeek]

Sorry to get off topic (back topic?) but there's a bit of an issue with fighter jets on Venus.... No oxidizer. A significant proportion of a jet's fuel and propellant are free on Earth... But barring really volatile and impractical fuels or one-man nuclear thermal jets, jets per se don't really work on Venus.

You'd probably end up with electric propeller planes, perhaps outfitted with booster rockets. Nothing would break the sound barrier except some expensive private rocket transports.

Well, yeah. That's why we were talking about how they would be slower but more maneuverable. :p

We didn't forget or anything, after all. >.> Not at all...

Rocket jets still cool tho.

[Helgoland]

You could actually try using carbon dioxide as your oxidant, but you'd have to be using quite funky exotic fuels.

[redwallzyl]

isn't Venus super hot and has a crushing atmosphere? that might put a damper on any Venusian jet plane.

[Wolfhunter107]

isn't Venus super hot and has a crushing atmosphere? that might put a damper on any Venusian jet plane.

The planes discussed here are flying off of floating settlements in the upper atmosphere, where the pressure and temperatures are survivable

[GiglameshDespair]

isn't Venus super hot and has a crushing atmosphere? that might put a damper on any Venusian jet plane.

The atmosphere of Venus is both hot and high pressure, but what happens to air pressure when you go up? It decreases, of course, and so does temperature.
Around 50km up, you get to 1 atmo pressure, which is much better, and that's where these planes would operate - from floating cities, since breathable air mixtures would be buoyant.

“However, viewed in a different way, the problem with Venus is merely that the ground level is too far below the one atmosphere level. At cloud-top level, Venus is the paradise planet.”

[Egan_BW]

Ya know, if you consider an unbreathable atmosphere and no ground to be "paradise".