Space exploration has been a dream for human beings for an eternity. To seek out new life and new civilizations–to boldly go where no one has gone before. I just wanna Star Trek it up; it would be so great, but I guess there’s always the Alien/Prometheus scenario. That wouldn’t be so great. So far we’ve travelled to the moon, but after reading this infographic, anything outside of that doesn’t look too optimistic at the moment.
So, apparently there’s a lot of radiation in space. Perhaps it’s Galactic Cosmic Rays, or perhaps it’s because of all of the crazy star matter that our sun is throwing at us. Either way, it seems like it’s significant enough to do some damage to the poor DNA in long-term space goers. Luckily for us Earthlings, our magnetic field keeps us safe from this endless radiation threatening to turn us into mutants (maybe it would be cool if we were mutants though…). But, if we were to send humans on a mars mission for instance, even in the shortest amount of time conceivable, the likelihood of said explorer getting fatal cancers will increase by 5.5%. Yowza.
If we are to realize our continuing mission of human exploration in space, we need to find a way around this radiation business. I wanna be a star fleet officer, dammit.
Do you think this might be an easy problem to overcome (radiation shields?), or does it stamp out any chance of long-term space exploration?