Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

oh and to address your second idea about MRI

when mice were exposed to cosmic ray bursts (to test for effects on past and future astronauts traveling to moon and mars)

the mice learned much much more slowly and forgot things much much faster

how's that for "cognitive corruption" ?

(btw this is also why I laugh when Musk thinks he's going to Mars ever, it's not just a one-way trip, he wouldn't even survive the journey itself with current technology and unlike earth there's no magnetic field or enough atmosphere on Mars to deflect them)

View on HN

> unlike earth there's no magnetic field or enough atmosphere on Mars to deflect them

These are solvable with known methods.

They make the whole thing rather less romantic.

If you're going to the trouble of e.g. burying your base under regolith or wrapping a planet in a big coil and lots of PV to make an artificial magnetic field, it very quickly becomes apparent that for essentially all possible disasters short of "oops we made a black hole and it caused a magnitude 15 earthquake and all the crust everywhere liquified and mixed with all the water so even ocean bases weren't safe", it's much, much easier to survive disasters on Earth without actually leaving Earth, than to go to Mars and have a normal day.

If someone made a robot factory that went mad and converted all the nitrogen in our atmosphere into ammonia (killing all the plants that no longer had access to the atmospheric nitrogen), while also producing enough smog to halve how much sunlight we got, and dumped a lot of endocrine disruptors into our water cycle, the top of Mount Everest and the Sahara desert would each still be much more hospitable than Mars is today.

It shouldn't be a surprise that it is very hard to keep humans alive outside the exact environment we evolved in. Current squishy humans will never colonize space, only intelligences using a vastly more durable substrate will be able to.

you get it exactly

I do like the theory of using a massive amount of water to surround a ship as a shield, it solves a lot of radiation problems and something humans desperately need for long travel (with super-recycling) but not a solution once you get there

and we'll definitely have super-advanced space-drones, eventually

I suspect so, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.

Enough humans seem to be repelled by the idea of transhumanism that they may well insist on doing it the hard way.

> ... effects on past and future astronauts traveling to moon and mars ... wouldn't even survive the journey itself with current technology ...

It's hard to tell given your phrasing but it almost sounds like you're insinuating that traveling to the moon is technically impossible, which would be quite a bold claim given the success of the Apollo missions. Apologies if I misinterpret.

when they examined the helmets of the astronauts that left the shielding of the capsule and walked around on the moon

they founds hundreds of grooves from cosmic ray particles that cut through the transparent front shield

the astronauts were seeing bursts of light even with their eyes closed

so their organs and brains were being damaged by particles moving at 99.9999% (26x.9s) the speed of light

if they had stayed for days they would have had permanent eye and brain damage and possibly other organs

so unless they invent domes and spacesuits that are COMPLETELY immune to cosmic rays (no such technology yet) humans are not walking around on the moon or mars for more than a few days

even astronauts on the ISS get eye damage with extended stays

there's a story of one trying to hide behind the battery racks to stop the bursts of light in their eyes even when closed during an extreme burst

space wants to kill humans, it doesn't even have to try hard

the Earth is amazing in how it protects us and how life is literally everywhere

ps. even space telescopes have to have their images cleaned up from hundreds of cosmic ray burst that hit their sensors and damage them, the raw images are very "dirty"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com