The Science of Star Wars: The Scientific Facts Behind the Force, Space Travel, and More!

by Mark Brake

Turns out Boba Fett had good reason for concern. On Earth, of course, it’s illegal to perform cryonic suspension on someone who is still alive. So please don’t try it at home. Terrestrial research shows that freezing damages the structure and integrity of tissues, so that stuff leaks out when the temperature is raised again. This much you can try at home: freeze and defrost a strawberry and you will soon have a good idea of the mushy mess that Han might become. So, even though a person may appear preserved on the surface, on a cellular level the damage is disastrous. Nature boasts a few creatures that can weather the freezing process—some frogs, fish, turtles, and insects. Their bodies produce huge amounts of the carbon-based sugar glucose, a natural antifreeze preventing ice-crystal formation. Sadly, sufficient levels of glucose in humans would come with a side-effect of death. But the terrestrial version of “freezing” folk reveals some possible secrets about what might have happened to Han. Once transported to a cryonics facility, patients aren’t simply slammed into a vat of liquid nitrogen. The water inside their cells would freeze. When water freezes, it expands. Their cells would simply shatter. The cryonics experts must somehow remove water from the cells and swap it with cryoprotectant, a sort of human antifreeze. This cryoprotectant, a glycerol-based chemical mixture, is an attempt to make for humans a version of the natural antifreeze that frogs and fish eke out w...