The radiation encountered on a journey to Mars and back could well kill space travellers, experts have warned. Astronauts would be bombarded by so much cosmic radiation that one in 10 of them could die from cancer.
The crew of any mission to Mars would also suffer increased risks of eye cataracts, loss of fertility and genetic defects in their children, according to a study by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Cosmic rays, which come from outer space and solar flares, are now regarded as a potential limiting factor for space travel. "I do not see how the problem of this hostile radiation environment can be easily overcome in the future," says Keran O'Brien, a space physicist from Northern Arizona University, US.
...
Helped by O'Brien, the FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City investigated the radiation doses likely to be received by people on a 2.7-year return trip to Mars, including a stay of more than a year on the planet. The study estimated that individual doses would end up being very high, at 2.26 sieverts.
This is enough to give 10% of men and 17% of women aged between 25 and 34 lethal cancers later in their lives, it concludes. The risks are much higher than the 3% maximum recommended for astronauts throughout their careers by the US National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.
The risks are smaller for older people because cancers have less time to develop. But women are always in more danger than men because they live longer and are more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers.
[from New Scientist]
Where do I sign up? A 17 percent chance of cancer in exchange for walking on the surface of another world? I’m in.
This idea that we should never take chances, never open ourselves up to risk is holding us back from doing the things we should be doing. When did we, as a species, stop being enthralled by the idea of discovery, of seeing and doing things that no one has seen or done before? We Xers are supposed to be particularly open to the idea of taking chances -- we popularized "extreme" sports, for instance, and we tend to disdain things like the financial and social security to be found in a corporate job. But it seems to me that extreme sports are only a return to the risky adventures we as humans always engaged in -- hunting woolly mammoths can’t have been risk-free endeavors, and the ice man in the Alps wasn’t out for a Sunday stroll. And if there was ever any security to be found in being a company man, that time has long gone.
Meanwhile:
Only 90 men made the first voyage of discovery from Palos Spain. The ships were quite tiny by modern standards--no longer than a tennis court, and less than 30 feet wide. The Santa Maria had 40 men aboard, the Pinta, 26, and the Nina, 24.
[from The 4 Voyages of Columbus]
It took Columbus’s ships 10 weeks to cross the Atlantic. How long would it take us to get to Mars with some clever application of our current technology?
Ten weeks.
(Can’t find a link to support this: I know I read it in a science fact article in Analog magazine a few years back, and the comparison has haunted me ever since.)
What are we waiting for? For us adventurous Xers to get into the positions of power from which we can make the decision to go, perhaps.
2 Comments
Leave a comment