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Rather than speculation it'd be useful if there was more hard science on the subject, you know by actually doing long term experiments on life in space being exposed to these heavy ions.

You can find scientific papers on a lot of subjects where it's hard to get at objective fact arguing one way or another and it's hard to tell how factual they really are.

Also why would you quote the "upper error bar"? I'd like to know the size of that error bar and what the median is.

> The upper error bar right now for a 1000 day Mars mission is upwards of 20% risk of radiation-induced death; most of this is from the heavy ion component of cosmic rays.

This is just an argument that you need to bury things in regolith, at least early on, until we get better shielding designed for heavy ions.



Here's the specific citation:

Assuming 940 day mission, percent risk of radiation-induced death for a 40 year old woman is:

* mean: 8.8; 95% confidence [2.78, 21.0]

For a 40 year old man:

* mean: 6.49; 95% confidence [2.58, 13.6]

Source is "Cancer and circulatory disease risks for a human mission to Mars: Private mission considerations", Acta Astronautica, 2018.

Narrowing this uncertainty range requires long-duration human or animal experiments outside the magnetosphere.


It’s also dependent on the effectiveness of various cancer treatments as well as the specific location etc.


These figures aren't limited to cancer, they include the risk of (also poorly understood) heavy ion radiation induced cardiovascular disease.


Thanks for the raw data. That's a very wide range.




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