Something very similar actually happened:
A janitor unplugged something because the alarm was annoying, and it destroyed decades of scientific work
What a read lmao
Yep, that’s the fun part of this whole cryogenic thing. In order for your body to make it into the 25th century or whatever, it needs to be continuously frozen for multiple centuries.
No defects, no prolonged power outages, no human errors, no your great-great-great-grandchildren deciding they don’t want to pay for keeping a guy frozen they never met.And even if your frozen body somehow makes it to the 25th century and they actually have the technology to restore your freeze-damaged body, you still need whoever’s alive then, to care to actually do that thing…
That’s why you gotta put the capsules in space
That’s quite an efficient freezer to be so big and only need up to 15A.
A well insulated freezer that never opens would use very little power once it’s already cooled. The impressive bit of this comic would be large thin pieces of glass providing enough insulation.
Time for my funny story!
At my University, the CIS department had a bunch of really expensive SGI servers (Origin 2000’s) together in a server room that was kept at some chilly temp, 50° or 60° or something (nothing crazy). One weekend the power went out, and while the CIS department had battery backup for the machines, facilities didn’t have battery backup for the A/C. They said, afterward, that the temperature in the room climbed by 200°F within a dozen minutes, and all of the SGIs crashed. The hard drives in those were designed to be spun up exactly once - the machines, once powered up, were never powered down - and the abrupt shut down ruined all the disks. I don’t know what it cost to replace them, but it was a minor financial scandal.
I loved SGI at the time. SGI shipped that model in these giant, 8’x4’x4’ crates, on which they printed “TERMINATOR - THIS SIDE UP ⬆️”, which in the 90’s was hilarious.
A bonus, related power outage story: once a friend of our’s was working on her graduate thesis; she was a graphics artist, so it was a CGI animation she’d build on a NeXTSTEP desktop. A few days before submission, some drunk ran his pickup truck into a power line pole in the middle of the night and killed the power in the off-campus housing where she lived and was currently working on her almost-complete program. The surge wiped her project - again, mid-90’s, disk was expensive, tape was even more expensive, and few people did backups regularly. She was set back several months and had to submit a really early version of the film. That wasn’t a funny story; it was a traumatic experience for her, and we all felt terrible about it.
Those really were some wild-west days, though, and there was some seriously sexy, entirely unaffordable, hardware out there, before everything went beige. NeXTSTEP and SGI workstations were the pinnacle of style, but even Sun offerings had some pizzaz. It wasn’t until Jobs came back to Apple that computers started getting style again.
Frankly whoever proposed a hard drive that couldn’t power down should’ve been backhanded by everyone in the room. Themselves included. Whatever team shipped that immediately evident error should’ve been fired. Not even “out of a cannon, into the sun.” Just regular told to pack their shit.
I may have misrepresented it: they may have been able to be parked, but that required a controlled shutdown - not a sudden hardware failure. And these were supercomputers, before cheap commodity hardware took over server rooms. It was common that these would be turned on and almost never be shut off except when being replaced.
Lots of hard drives required parking and would risk running the drive if the heads weren’t parked before being spun down. The design required the later of air from the spinning disks to float the heads over the disks - if you didn’t park the heads before spinning them down, the heads would touch down on the disks, sometimes while there were still spinning, and scratch the surface and ruin the disk.
