NASA's radiation hazard research teams are very concerned about the effects of space radiation (radiation outside the Earths protective Van Allen belt) on our brains. They are worried that exposure to radiation over long spaceflights could slowly deteriorate our brains by destroying and disrupting neuronal actions.

We could make it to Mars, but by the time we are ready to come home we have forgotten how, or we get home and don't even know who or what Mars is.

It is also not known whether exposure to a major solar flare could render us vitually dumb, mute, paralyzed, a drooling mass of vapid cells.

:blink: Add to this that we do know our DNA will be zapped routinely and we may not want to think about adding to the family tree.

Yes, I know there is an air of the same kind of alarming outcomes just like those predicted to happen to Columbus and other explorers. However, our science is better now, and we ought to get it right with research before subjecting our space explorers to cognitive annihilation.

What do you think?

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<span style='font-family:Arial'><span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'><span style='color:blue'>setiman
If I had a cousin, his name would be Yoda.</span></span></span>

Earthlings, we and our evolutionary progenitors, have been in space flight for 3.5 billion years or so and the effects on us are, on net, beneficial. So we know it can be safely done; the trick is to do it without carrying the whole earth with us. The most detrimental form of radiation, because it is the most difficult to protect ourselves from, is hard gamma radiation which I believe to be of low density and solvable. Cosmic rays may erode the hull of our ship after sufficient time. Feedback from such experience will enable us to solve this also.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

How about shrink-wrapping somebody before space flight?
Doesn't plastic have really good properties for reducing radiation, even Cosmic Rays?
Not going to be comfortable, but I'd rather be shrink-wrapped than brain-zapped.

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Everyone rises to their own level of incompetance.