Remembrance of Earth's Past, #3
Death's End
by Cixin Liu
Contents
Excerpt from A Past Outside of Time Hibernation: Man Walks for the First Time Through Time
Overview
This historical excerpt explains how artificial hibernation transformed from a feared social technology into a practical tool after the Trisolar Crisis. Before the Crisis, hibernation threatened to let the privileged abandon the present and perhaps reach immortality, but the Crisis made the future terrifying instead of desirable.
As a result, governments relaxed restrictions, allowing hibernation to mature into the technology that lets humanity—and key individuals in the broader story—move through time.
Summary
The excerpt explains that artificial hibernation, like early computing, was initially misunderstood as a narrow medical or spaceflight tool. Once viewed sociologically, however, hibernation promised to reshape civilization because it allowed people to move through time and rest their hopes on the belief that tomorrow would be better.
Before the Trisolar Crisis, faith in progress had become widespread after centuries of industrial development. Many people assumed that the distant future would be vastly superior to the present, which made hibernation tempting not just for the sick but for anyone who could afford to skip an imperfect era.
The excerpt identifies the danger of this temptation: if the wealthy could hibernate until a better future arrived, poorer people would be left behind to build that future. Even more destabilizing was the possibility that future biology might conquer death, making hibernation a route toward immortality and undermining death as a universal human condition.
Because of these social dangers, governments suppressed hibernation more intensely than cloning before the Crisis. After the Crisis began, the future no longer looked like paradise but like possible destruction, so the urge to flee forward weakened. With its disruptive appeal reduced, hibernation was permitted to develop freely and soon became humanity’s first practical means of crossing long spans of time.