Autarchy

Under such conditions, a year in the HTC could well be considered “cruel and unusual punishment”; no doctor would volunteer for it, so any prisoners in the HTC face a serious risk of death from any cause unless a fellow prisoner that day/year had medical training. The food will also suck, as any food will have to be storable for a year (it wouldn’t do to starve to death a day before the door opens back to the real world); you can’t grow your own because there is no apparent sun, soil, or seasons inside the HTC, and while you could probably bring in a greenhouse & soil and fertilize with recycled food, how are you going to power the lights in your greenhouse? Drag in a miniature nuclear power plant or a radioisotope thermoelectric generator? And we haven’t even considered how much time one would spend (waste) on this small-scale agriculture; maintaining Biosphere 2 was a full-time job for many highly-skilled people, and if that was true for the HTC, there would hardly be any point in it.

If one punted on the problems of maintaining a high quality of life and posited a dedicated researcher, well, the HTC is still not useful. They will find it hard to take with them an entire library or laboratory, many ingredients are too expensive or perishable to buy in advance just because the researcher might need them, but if they don’t have access to pretty much everything, they’ll quickly hit some sort of barrier where one email or order would let them finish a project but that email can’t be sent for up to a year. (Imagine a researcher who enters the HTC—and his laptop’s hard-drive dies. Oops. Hope he had backups or spares, of his data and his laptop and everything else for that matter.) Omitting these concerns, research is a social process in the sense that one is often discussing or explaining or defending the research, and without these interactions it is easy to go down blind alleys, make minor-seeming but fatal mistakes¹, wind up reinventing something standard in another field, etc. One can easily waste a month this way, and so a year. A group would help, but groups are susceptible to groupthink and will still go down blind alleys or simply lack relevant expertise. (In this respect, the Millennial Maths in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem are highly unrealistic; any group of academics which closeted themselves for a millennium would overwhelmingly likely be a sheer waste of human capital.)

One might wonder about other kinds of education in the HTC like mathematics, but all the above points apply to any reason to live in the HTC: why would you accept all those burdens to spend a year learning something… when you could just live that same year in the real world at much less cost and a far higher standard of living? It certainly would be nice to go into the HTC for a few weeks and come back with a dozen PhDs—but not if you emerge aged 40, having lived the best years of your life in a prison cell and probably deep in debt too!

Aging

Speaking of a few years in the HTC, what about biological aging? People don’t ordinarily spend half their lives acquiring multiple degrees outside the prison of an HTC, why would they voluntarily do so inside it? It’s the same trade, after all: half your life for multiple degrees. This point has been made in fictional treatments of time-acceleration R.A. Lafferty’s classic short story “The Six Fingers of Time” where the protagonist is given the ability to slow down time by a mysterious ancient conspiracy, and while he tries to uncover their secrets, he dies of old age—they had let him slow down time, but not his inherent natural aging. Or William Sleator’s YA novel Singularity, where the original discoverer of the HTC dies before his family expects it, looking suspiciously like an old man; the implication is that he spent so much time in the HTC investigating it that the normal aging while inside it used up a good chunk of his lifespan. Ironically, if he had been able to survive another month, he would have seen the resolution of the mystery. The protagonist benefits somewhat from his own year in the HTC, but for idiosyncratic reasons. Similarly in Greg Egan’s The Clockwork Rocket the protagonist discovers a method of time acceleration which she resolves to use to save her world from certain doom by launching a generation ship to be accelerated and discover some salvation; but she and the first generation (a good chunk of their world’s scientific community) fully expect to perish of age long before the generation ship returns just years later in realtime. In a more conventional example, we may admire how prison & revenge give the Count in The Count of Monte Cristo a great deal of focus during his educational prison stay but how many of us would agree to be imprisoned the same way if there were no hidden fortune waiting for us at the end?

This is a fundamental issue and probably why time-acceleration is an underused trope in science fiction compared to time dilation or time travel: the downside is simply too apparent.

Zero-Sum Competition

The point about the HTC ‘rearranging relative time’ for athletes and the original use in DBZ—training to save the world when every minute counts—suggests one class of problems: things which are extremely time-sensitive with multiple competing groups and zero-sum or winner-take-all dynamics.

With large sums of money at stake, we can hand-wave the super-supermax prison points: oil companies only have to pay oil rig workers a few score or hundreds of thousands of dollars for working several weeks at a time on oil rigs, and scientists and astronauts compete for position in isolated facilities as Antarctic bases or the International Space Station. All of these are far less isolated or burdensome than the HTC, but by more than a few factors? Seems unlikely. So a few million dollars may suffice to cover the costs of a small group, especially if they can reuse infrastructure from previous days/years.

Are there business problems where a year’s headstart is worth at least a few million dollars? Sure! Many programming tasks come to mind: would Google pay a few million to lock up the core Android coders to take care of a years’ worth of outstanding bugs and to-do items? Would Apple do something similar? What about any hedge fund? It seems plausible that every day of a HTC could be booked or even auctioned off.

The negatives here include the lack of communication and iteration: when the group heads through the door, that’s the last they’ll hear from the world for a year. They can’t release a prototype at the 6 month mark and see how it does after a month. If they fall to groupthink and take the wrong approach, there are no outsiders who will say that their approach is crazy and elaborate and why don’t they just do the standard thing? Worse, if they discover they forgot a key piece of documentation or hardware or they run out of chips or they need a particular expert or something, the next time they can get it is… a year later. Oops. Hope that wasn’t a fatal error. (Even if they had communication, it’d only bound the losses: if it takes a second to load a webpage in realtime, then it will take them >365 seconds or >6 minutes.) This lack of iteration runs counter to many business styles and is entirely antithetical to modern tech businesses which prize constant feedback and ability to change ideas & approaches on a dime.

Still, with multi-terabyte hard drives, one could just take a copy of all documentation and source code (or perhaps bring along a few Internet Archive-style “petaboxes” and store a copy of a small fraction of the Internet), and for some tasks like stock-market research, it’s plausible one could bring everything one needs. Hedge funds would probably benefit from being able to send in their quants for a year of concentrated research and scoop the competition.

Non-Zero-Sum Uses

The more concrete a field, the less the benefit. Most commercial services would be impossible: you can’t cut someone’s hair in the real world from the HTC, although with loads of equipment you could work on a robot which cuts hair. You can’t run clinical drug experiments on a group of patients from inside a HTC either; for that matter, you’ll have a hard time bringing along rats or monkeys. But you could read a lot of papers on rats. (But not necessarily do much; for example, meta-analyses will be hard because frequently authors do not include the exact numbers one needs, and so one has to contact them—exactly what can’t be done in the HTC.) Pure mathematicians might benefit, but by and large, mathematics is not so competitive & time-sensitive that sticking some mathematicians into the HTC would be worth the premium.

Which is not to say there are no concrete uses. One cute example would be storage of goods: instead of an art & wine free port, just stick your wine & cheese & other goods in the HTC and let them age a year every day until ripened to perfection. More valuably, one could bypass accelerated aging tests and just age a product directly; want to know if the Clock of the Long Now will work or the Rosetta disk be readable for 10,000 years under ideal conditions? That’s just 10,000 days or 28 years away. (We could also expect an efflorescence of counterfeit art, documents, and goods for the same reasons.) Better yet, want to run fast primate aging experiments? If you can front the money and either automate the care & feeding of the subjects or find lab technicians willing to spend their lives in prison, you can run as many as you please.

These wouldn’t be revolutionary improvements, though (with the exception of aging research which might revolutionize human society if the results were useful).