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But whatever sort of spaceship
you opt for, you're going to be faced with the aforementioned fact
that space is big; really big. Carrying enough food, oxygen,
aerosol deodorant, and other vital supplies for voyages that could
last anything from months to years is an incredibly costly affair.
Think of it as going into the local restaurant and ordering a roast
unicorn stuffed with beluga caviar and washed down with a hogshead of
Chateau Le Tour 1947. Now imagine forking out for that every
meal and you get the idea of what the catering bill would be like.
Even if you mange to somehow
recycle all of your wastes with maximum 100% efficiency (good luck!)
and patch your underwear for the next five years, there's still the
nagging little worry of how are you going to keep the crew from going
stark, raving mad from boredom? Games of "I Spy" get pretty old
pretty quick in the monotony of space.
One answer is to take a cue from
the squirrels and sleep the long years away. Doped up with
narcoleptic drugs and their body temperatures reduced to icebox
levels, the space travellers would only breath once a minute as they
rest in dreamless repose.
 Meanwhile,
the ship would be run by a state of the art computer so advanced that
it could reasonably be called intelligent. This computer would
monitor all systems and make certain that the hibernating crew came to
no harm until it was time to awake them at their destination.
What could possibly go wrong
with an arrangement like that?
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