Quote Originally Posted by Viking View Post
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.
Hibernation exists, yes. It works by the virtue of some organisms living off other organisms that happen to be around without any active doing of the other ones. Animals rely on plants or other animals to `magically' collect the energy all in one place so they can eat all of it quickly before the next hibernation. That works in a complex ecosystem such as the earth because there *are* other energy sources for the plants and prey animals to begin with, recursively, that are not exhausted quickly and replenish. Such ecosystems would (a) have to be understood in their entirety; (b) be possible to `carry around with you' in order for such a thing to work on a spaceship. So far our experiments with sustainable ecosystems have been mostly miserable failures which suggests (a) is a bit more complex than it might at first seem. So far our spaceships do not generally feature much room for passengers, let alone entire ecosystems, suggesting (b) might be a little tricky too: it's after all not just because it is cheaper to build small spacecraft that we keep the dimensions of capsules and rockets down.

Spin all you want it does not cause (additional) gravity to spring into existence. That's not how gravity works.