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Comment by QAPereo | Hacker News Reader

Inflatable, radiation shielding, light emitting? How.

Edit: Plants and non-human animals wouldn’t appreciate Martian rads either.

They don't really need to be radiation shielding or light emitting. People don't need to live there, just plants and animals. And insolation on Mars is sufficient for light.

Excessive radiation can also kill plants and animals

Even before it kills them, it definitely ruins their reproductive capacity, which is going to be critical offworld.

We could have a breeding population in an expensive shielded environment, and take most of their young to grow in a cheap, more radioactive environment.

Now that’s a really interesting idea! Add in a bank of shielded frozen embryos and sperm and yes, I can see your point.

Is the radiation on Mars excessive? Quick googling suggests 10-20 rem per year, or about half that of the ISS. As far as I know plants do grow on the ISS.

Plants are pretty tolerant of solar radiation. Far more so than humans.

In any event, what you'd probably do is use reflected light to filter out high energy particles.

Background radiation in Mars is way lower than would be necessary to kill plants and, like, it might increase cancer rates in animals, but the kind of animals we'd want to breed there have short lifespans and we don't care if they get a few tumors.

Underground, LEDs, hydroponics?

Sure, but now you’re spending the Dv to get all of that to Mars.

Still much cheaper than shipping dirt to Mars.

It's even cheaper to construct and use all that stuff on Earth.

Not risk adjusted.

Compared to the risk of Mars? I take your point, but let’s be realistic about our odds on Mars without Earth backing it all up.

Granted. And initially, sure, but aiming long term for a single-planetary culture that took 3.8 billion years to develop seems shortsighted.

The risk of that life snuffing out may be small, but the time cost of replacement should that happen is huge.

That doesn't help a establish a Mars colony, which pretty much rules out that option if you want to establish a Mars colony.

It does, because you can figure out how to make all this stuff work[1] without spending hundreds of billions of dollars going to Mars. You'll also probably discover that you don't actually want to establish a Mars colony.

[1] We don't actually know how to make it work. The Biosphere 2 project was a spectacular failure, and it operated with a much less difficult set of constraints.

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