The book club visit and the messiness of stasis pods

It has been brought to my attention that I don’t include enough tubes in my science fiction.

A book club invited me to their discussion on Day 115 on an Alien World. It was an interesting and slightly surreal experience. It pointed out how people notice radically different things when they read. In theory, I knew this, but it really sunk in when everyone voiced opinions about the plot and characters--and all were way different than mine (and I made it all up in the first place!).

Even technical details get viewed differently. My background is more on the physics side, as a result, I spent a lot of time thinking about how a space ship could get between different solar systems without having generations pass. It appears there are only two options:

Option 1 - Faster than light travel (FTL). This is the warp drive of Star Trek. Somehow in the future humans or aliens figure out how to get around the fact the closer to light speed matter (i.e. the spaceship and everyone in it) gets the heavier it is.

Option 2 - Wormholes. This is the Stargate option. Here humans or aliens figure out how to create or use natural shortcuts between distant locations. Wormholes in theory are possible but spaghettification would have to be avoided.

I went for option 2 and put the wormhole in an inconvenient spot requiring a long period of slower than light speed travel. What are my characters going to do while travelling? Sleep of course!

Like warp drives and stargates, stasis pods are everywhere in scifi. I put my characters into stasis pod and moved on to thinking how to generate gravity on my fictitious ship (angular momentum formulas apply and I may or may not have done actual calculations).

At the book club meeting, a scientist who works in a biology related field peppered me with pointed questions about stasis pods--questions I hadn’t even considered such as: how do the people get fed? (the answer is tubes). And how does waste get removed? (the answer again is tubes). It turned out, instead of the physics I’d focused on, she focused on what she was familiar with (biology) and started thinking it through.

Next time stasis pods are required, my characters will have to endure more tubes and deal with the general biological messiness that likely would result.