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'Space Brain': Mars Explorers May Risk Neural Damage, Study Finds (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Astronauts making a years-long voyage to Mars may get bombarded with enough cosmic radiation to seriously damage their brains, researchers reported Monday. The damage might be bad enough to affect memory and, worse, might heighten anxiety, the team at the University of California Irvine said. It's the second study the team has done to show that cosmic radiation causes permanent, and likely untreatable, brain damage. While their experiments involve mice, the brain structures that are damaged are similar, they write in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. NASA knows that astronauts risk physical damage from the radiation encountered in space. Earth is enveloped in a large, protective sheath called the magnetosphere, which deflects a lot of the ionizing radioactive particles that speed through space. Teams aboard the International Space Station are inside that envelope. But moon travelers were not, and this summer a study showed the cosmic radiation may have damaged the hearts of many of the Apollo program astronauts. A trip to Mars would expose astronauts to even more radiation -- enough to cause cancer, for sure, and now this research suggests brain damage, as well. They bombarded mice with the same type of radiation that would be encountered in space, and then looked at what happened to their brains. It did not look good. The changes were seen in the connections between brain cells and in the cells, as well. "Exposure to these particles can lead to a range of potential central nervous system complications that can occur during and persist long after actual space travel -- such as various performance decrements, memory deficits, anxiety, depression and impaired decision-making. Many of these adverse consequences to cognition may continue and progress throughout life."
If they think it's viable then then already have neural damage. A little more won't make much of a difference.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Magnetic shielding (on practical scales) is not effective against GCR, only solar. The article talks about GCR.
IMHO, SpaceX probably has the right solution to radiation: go fast. If you have to bring up extra mass anyway, you might as well make that mass be fuel to shorten the trip rather than inert shielding for a long coast (although there clearly is *some* balancing point; paper-thin walls won't do, even on a short-trip). Also, their solution of "go big" is probably right, as surface area to shield rises propotional to the radius squared but internal volume (and mass / payload capacity of boosters) rises proportional to the radius cubed (assuming proportions are kept roughly the same on all three axes). The bigger your crew transport vehicle, the lower the percentage of its mass that needs to be dedicated to shielding to achieve the same result.
But there's no question that radiation is one of those issues that we really don't have a good "magic bullet" for.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
You'll launch it piece by piece and build the vessel in space (like the ship harbour of older movies, or like the real-world ISS).
No, if you want to build real interplanetary vessels, you'll build them in space, not on the Earth. Lifting the entire mass of a ship from the Earth's solution isn't economical or practical; all the major building materials we need are already in space.