[AR] Re: Nothing to do with rockets.
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2021 23:49:44 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 1 Oct 2021, Anthony Cesaroni wrote:
Alas, one number that is missing from happy pictures like this is
"radiation dose to crew"...
Proposed solution was the same for nuclear bomber crews initially. Keep
them beyond reproductive age. A lot older.
Unfortunately, the main effect of 10m-Orion-level radiation doses is not
that they give you two-headed babies :-), but that they give you cancer
which kills you. There is still some benefit from using older crews,
because cancer takes time to develop and they're more likely to die of
something else first, but it reduces the problem rather than eliminating
it.
(And reproductive age doesn't matter much as once thought. The concept of
mutations scared people in the early Atomic Age, but we now know that
*every last one of us* is a mutant. No, your DNA is not just a
semi-random mixture of your parents', because DNA copying -- both in
production of eggs and sperm, and in cell division starting from a
fertilized egg -- makes mistakes; in fact, it's surprising that it makes
so few. The average person's DNA is a mixture of their parents' DNA,
*plus* several dozen semi-random copying errors... and then throw in some
more copying errors during development, so that even the cells in your
body don't all have quite the same DNA. Mutations are everywhere and
mostly harmless. Studies looking for inherited defects in descendants of
the atom-bomb survivors, if I recall correctly, found nothing -- effects
not reliably distinguishable from zero.)
Henry
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