I seem to remember reading an article about low berths in either the
original TAS or maybe MTJ about how professional athletes and performers
used low berths as a way to "extend their shelf life" by going into them
between seasons and jobs.  This, the article suggested, allowed a
professional athlete to have almost twice the effective career length as
he would have had otherwise, being in the low berth for about half a
year at a stretch.  Performers had a somewhat longer window as they
would only be "thawed" for a few months to do the production and then go
back under until something else of value came along.  Given the way we
can do deep fakes, and extrapolating that and green screen technology,
I'm not sure there will even be live performers for vid shows, but
that's another thread entirely.

What really kicked off this thought exercise was something I'm currently
writing.  One of the characters has two puppies that he's going to show
in the puppy class at the dog show, and I started wondering how a low
berth would be able to extend a show dog's career.  Once they win their
Championship title, the next is Grand Champion and beyond that it's all
ribbons for the "such a good dog!" wall.  It takes a year, maybe two or
more depending on how often the dog is shown and how many dogs are in
each show.  Sometimes, once a dog becomes a Champion, the handler will
retire it and only show the dog in certain shows.

This would work with just about any type of competition that used an
animal; horse races, poni races, whatever.  It would allow the effective
career to be extended to several times that of a normal lifetime, while
also allowing the animal to be steadily bred.

Beyond this, I could also see certain governments using the frozen watch
concept writ large; they want a large military, but rather than have
five million people under arms, they put three million in dispersed
bunkers on extended "tours" of duty and only raise them when they're needed.

Anyway, I'm curious how others might use the low berth in an unexpected
manner.

--
Kurt Feltenberger
xxxxxx@thepaw.org/xxxxxx@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me