Frankenstein on Kepler-22b

One if the challenges of human travel to other stars is the amount of time needed to travel.  Even at near luminal speed, travel-time would be years, at least from the point of view of an outside observer.  One solution as put forth in many science fiction is development of hypersleep or suspended animation of the travelers.  Such ability to suspend animation has yet to be proven practicable.  Much research has been done in the field of cryonics, mainly to freeze people that have died of terminal diseases with the hope of reanimating them at some future time when their lives can be extended with future medical advances.  Cryonically freezing interstellar travelers may offer a way to get to the stars, especially since interstellar space is already cold (2.7 Kelvin) so one would not need to maintain cryogenic fluids.  Assuming shielding can be developed to mitigate cosmic and gamma radiation, then the time to travel can be expanded to some maximal amount.  As entropy increases over time in the travelers' bodies and brains over a certain threshold the ability to reanimate would decrease.  The extreme cold would slow this entropy perhaps enough to keep the travelers viable for reanimation for several millennia.

Another technology which may have applications for interstellar travel is biological tissue and organ 3D printing.  

Ongoing research in this area will eventually obviate the need for organ donation, or that is the hope.  Scientists are researching the possibility of using a patient's own stem-cells to grow or print out spare organs.  Extrapolating this, one may speculate that one day, whole bodies can be "printed out."  Such printing out sidesteps many ethical issues of human cloning for spare parts.  

Speculating even further, one can envision a future where people getting on in age would have a new body from the neck down printed out and have a head transplant to switch their heads to younger (stem cell-wise) bodies.  Would an ostensibly young body rejuvenate an old head?  A 10 out of 10 on the Frankenstein creepiness scale no doubt.    

So back to implications for interstellar travel.  Logistically, freezing just the heads of the travelers would make travel to stars faster given less mass would accelerate a ship faster per thrust.  Thus after a long journey, the ship would use a sample of the traveler's stem cells to grow and print out a body from molecules taken from planets orbiting other stars.  

Discover of 700+ new Exoplanets

Yesterday, NASA announced discovery of over 700 more planets orbiting other stars. In the far, far future, humanity won't have any lack of places to explore.