I'm not convinced of the "reversible" part. We don't actually know whether it's feasible to shut a sentient brain down completely for years and then start it up again and have it just resume working normally. In my own writing, I'm more comfortable going with a form of hibernation that only radically slows life processes, allowing brain activity to continue at a low level, than with full-on corpsicles.
Hence "at best." At present, it's
irreversible death, but megakelvin/sec cooling is possible, vitrification agents have been identified, and the remaining major problems appear to be chemical and radioactive damage. (One is quasi-soluble, the other I admit requires either Drexlerian magic or a non-human subject.)
But I dunno if human hibernation has any proof of concept at all, though... and it's possibly less interesting, I think, because it's less complicated and sciencey.
And "hypersleep" is a valid, if slightly corny, term for such a thing -- it basically means "beyond sleep." (Well, more literally it would mean "above sleep," which suggests, well, being awake; maybe "hyposleep," something further "below" a sleep state, i.e. more deeply "under," would be more strictly appropriate. Although since the Greek word for sleep is hypnos, it would be "hypohypnosis.")
There's an image in the link that has a diagram of the ship with callouts:
http://img.trekmovie.com/images/sfs/l5concept-2-large-sftv135.jpg
THE ARGO is propelled by an experimental propulsion system that generates an artificial black hole, and uses it to generate hawking [sic] radiation, which it then reflects with a large parabolic dish.
This is a real concept that I've read about, and not unlike the drive Arthur C. Clarke used in
Imperial Earth (though he wrote that shortly before Hawking did his work on black hole evaporation, so the radiation concept wasn't part of it). While the means of creating the BH is probably "black box" science, the rest of it is credible.
That's cool, albeit kinda hard to read.
The asymptotic drive was the one part of Imperial Earth I didn't care for much, although it was probably hard for Clarke to come up with something
even better than the fusion torchships they already had and on which the Titan economy was based. (Funny you mention IE, I just reread it. I love that book.)
Getting a black hole is hard too, but I've read some stuff indicating that there are some theoretical ways of making an artificial black hole, if you have enough available power and the proper laser setup.
On the other hand, an evaporation drive has some issues--namely, you can't turn it off. Maybe I'm wrong, but it strikes me as very similar to a fission fragment rocket... but one which is
always fissioning (although for this Argo, they've decided to use a propellant separate from the fuel). Also one which is not intensely bright would also be immensely massive. And it will only get brighter every year; the last few years are ridiculously energetic.
Although I'm not convinced that a Hawking radiation drive could produce the kind of thrust needed to reach relativistic speeds.
Everything's a relativistic speed. Maybe they just mean a long-term journey at .2c. Sure, that's 10.2 seconds on Earth for every 10 in space, but that adds up. It's not going to really screw with any perceptions, but it's something you'd have to account for, for astrogation, etc.
Actually, that raises another question: who would send a crewed expedition to Barnard's Star at sublight velocities at the expense of several multiples of present global GDP, without an intention of setting up a colony there? I've always thought a one-way trip makes a lot more sense in these cases. Not only because of the expense, but the human problem. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, anyone who wanted the job is a lot less likely to be qualified for it.
