How to freeeze human beings

The biggest problem about freezing human beings and sending them to the stars was not the freezing process. Anybody can freeze anything. It's just the thawing and preserving that is the tricky part.

I needed a viable way to send people to the stars and even at the impossible speeds I postulated, 1/20th the speed of light, it would still take Rei 240 years to get to Tau Ceti. This was at the core of my science fiction trilogy Rome's Revolution.

My research had revealed it was not the freezing process, per se, but rather the side effects of freezing, that made it a problem. Water expands as it gets colder and occupies its highest volume at 4 degrees Celsius. That means that ordinary cells will burst when they freeze. So if you froze a human being while they were still alive, technically, they'd be alive the whole time. But when you thawed them out, they would die because their cells had burst.

So I invented this thing called the dehydration protocol. In a story in the upcoming The Vuduri Companion, you will learn about Sven Ausland, also known as the Ice Man, who survived for 17 years frozen solid and was thawed successfully. The only reason Sven survived was because he was severely dehydrated before he was frozen solid. The scientists behind the Ark program were smart enough to put the two items together and create the dehydration protocol which allowed humans to be frozen solid and reanimated years later and survive the process.