Do you think there are aliens?

[Viking]

Which is no less exotic, I'm sure. Seriously: hibernation is not an option if you want to survive your travels: one needs to eat in order to hibernate; and in order to eat one needs to wake up. So at best you merely prolong the eat-sleep cycle, which incidentally makes hibernation only practical for small-ish aliens because you cannot tend any crops or similar whilst hibernating.

EDIT: There are various other interesting Health & Safety issues regarding to hibernation & space travel, too. Chief among which is that you no longer have the environmental sanity-checks of seasons, gravity, etc. etc. to trigger interrupts in your hibernation, and keep your organs healthy.

It's less exotic because hibernation does exist, and so do multiple generations. You may need to eat, but I think that the idea here is that the amount of energy required to sustain the crew is lowered dramatically. Also, it is not so that all of the crew must be in hibernation mode at the same time. I believe that we could introduce gravity with a spinning space craft without too much trouble? Little friction in space to slow the spinning down.

The only thing that concerns me is that scientists have been looking for earth like planets orbiting nearby stars for some time now and all they have found are gas giants. No earth-like planets. I do realise that the technology is in its infancy and small planets like earth are incredibly hard to see (I am taking the vastnes of space into account), I guess it just depresses me. Limited technology and the lack of anything substantial within fathomable distances. Perhaps those Star Trekie things like worm holes and wrinkles in time and space are indeed plausable. I read somewhere (don't quote me) that the creator of Star Trek had some good ideas in theroy. Or was that Jules Verne? Again, don't quote me.

To my knowledge, the lack of smaller planets is at this time nothing at all to worry about. The smaller the planets are, the more precise must the instruments be; so essentially, the lack of instruments that are precise enough is the sole reason at this point in time.

Not to mention even if you did travel to an alien world in hibernation at the speed of light, by the time you returned to earth or vice versa thousands of years will have passed. The founders of the project will be long dead and the space traveler will be out of place and lose his/her understanding of the civilization he/she left.

The nearest alien solar system is just about 4 light years away, and within a radius of 50 l.y. you can find quite a few more, I believe. Though yes, things like that are problematic; and the reason why I wanted to introduce hibernation is because we didn't want to try to travel near the speed of light.