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Googling for radiation exposure limits linked me to this, which cites 50mSv/year as a federal limit. UK and Germany are 20mSv/year for radiation workers.
Google's AI claims that 1Sv is associated with a 5% chance of developing a fatal tumor.
Sure, it will be spread out over 2.5 years or so, which is better than what the Chernobyl workers got (generally a few Sv over a short period).
In the end, it is a question of perspective. One culture might say "so we expect that 1 in 100 might develop cancer on their trip to Mars. No problem, we just plan 5% excess personnel. Also, for the return trip, the survivors will have 0Sv exposure because we found that shipping a gram of cyanide per person is much more cost effective than shipping a rocket to Mars."
But modern Western attitudes insist that stuff has to be very very safe. 20mSv per year, and also one of the astronauts must be qualified to give the yearly (utterly pointless) physical to the others. (Or possibly two of them, I am not sure if radiation safety physicians go blind if they certify themselves.) The radiation monitoring apparatus (one dosimeter per worker, naturally) will take 10MEuro to develop and weight 200kg in total. Planning to leave people stranded on Mars would be regarded as utterly monstrous, even if there would be no shortage of volunteers.
A cursory googling suggests that the energy contained in Earth's magnetic field is similar to the annual energy consumption of Denmark. Taking their power plants to Sun-Mars L1 will be even less popular with them than what Trump plans with Greenland.
Different biomes have different minimum population sizes to be self-sufficient. On Earth, primitive societies can basically run with a few dozen people (though they require access to a larger gene pool for long-term viability). To support industrialization, you want millions. For cutting edge electronics, hundreds of million of customers are required to pay for the development.
On Mars, you obviously do not get hunter-gatherer societies. Or even steam-age societies. Let us say the tech level required to sustain life is about that of the contemporary West (but with more of a focus on pressure containers rather than iPhones and TikTok).
Even if we say they get 100 grams of semiconductors (and a bit of nuclear fuel) per person per year from Earth (so they do not need to build their own water purification control chips), and also the latest TikToks (because information transmission is basically free), that would leave a lot of industries in which they would have to be self-sustaining. Metallurgy. Petrochemistry. Machining. Glass-making. Electrochemistry. All of these have long and complex supply chains. You can not have one metallurgist/smith who runs a bloomery with her apprentices, you need thousands of specialists in the supply chain for industrial level steel (who are in turn supported by tens of thousands of specialists in only vaguely related fields).
This seems more reasonable. But robots which self-replicate on Mars are almost as tall an ask as humans which do. Semiconductors probably have the most complex supply chains of any product on Earth. Sure, for most purposes, they will not need to run the latest processes. Let their drones deal with 8086s instead of fancy ARM chips (except this might make it so more likely that they paperclip us out of spite). We can probably ship them some fabs, too.
Still, they would probably be reliant on Earth for their brains, because the supply chain for the H200 is probably among the most complex ones we have, and I think that a larger feature size makes running LLMs prohibitively expensive very fast -- the main reason the AI boom did not happen in 2010 was that chips did not have the power back then.
The problem is that we have no clue how to build a VNR. I mean, a space elevator looks trivial in comparison, as soon as we find a material with sufficient tensile strength (which may very well be never), we could figure out the rest without too much trouble.
I mean, I can imagine a continent with a billion robots which run robot factories, but this seems a very non-central example of a VNR. Something which simply mines asteroids and makes more of itself will probably have to be as different both from us meatbags and robots as meatbags are from robots.
I seem to have misremembered, but that still doesn't change anything. The "official" maximum dose figures are deeply retarded. That's what you get when you use ALARA/LNT models and ignore hormesis.
As a natural experiment, the town of Ramsar in Iran has hotspots with ~260 mSv a year without any detectable consequences for the locals. Even assuming an average of 80 mSv (well higher than the legal limits) shows no longterm issues.
That's correct, as far as I can tell. 1 Sv is bad for you in both LNT and realistic terms. But that is a lifetime risk. You won't lose 5% of the crew in 2 years. It really isn't that big of a deal, and there are enough people with risk-appetites large enough (thousands, probably millions). That's an increased cancer risk comparable to heavy daily drinking, and there are plenty of alcoholics around.
The average person's lifetime risk of developing any cancer is roughly 40-45%. A 5 percentage point absolute increase means going from, say, 42% to 47%. That's meaningful but not dramatic.
Age-adjusted cancer mortality in the US rose significantly through most of the 20th century, peaked around 1990-1991, and has been falling since. The decline from that peak to today is roughly 33%, which is substantial. An absolute 5% increase in all cancers (not necessarily fatal ones) puts us well ahead, nonetheless. A 5% lifetime fatal cancer risk (assuming the cancers are fatal) increase is real, but it sits comfortably within the range of risks that coal miners, commercial fishermen, and military personnel have historically accepted as part of their profession - and those professions were not considered monstrous.
I think it is shaky to assume that safetyism extends as far as you think it does. Especially when SpaceX, as a private entity, is willing to assume more risk and hire accordingly. The relevant comparison isn't "is this within the comfort zone of a desk-job radiation worker" but "is this acceptable for a volunteer who has been fully informed of the risk profile and consents."
Worst case, we come up with thicker radiation shielding and shorter trips, and eat the cost. That's leaving aside massive improvements in cancer treatments, which will likely continue, or the fact that permanent colonists would spend most of their time indoors.
Uh.. What exactly is this objection trying to show? Do you think that we have to steal a few nuclear reactors from Denmark to make this work? I recall the proposal wanted 450 MW for the L1 dipole, which is a high but not ridiculous power draw. A drop in the bucket, if we want a large number of humans traipsing about on the Martian surface.
GPT-2, which arguably kicked off the whole thing, came at a time of a significant compute overhang. I'm pretty sure it could have been trained with ease a decade or more earlier than it was. Probably 3 too, though modern models are obviously at saturation today. I think that would have been sufficient incentive to invest even harder into GPUs than we already had, historically speaking.
Earth/Human civilization on it is a proof-of-concept for a VNR. Without getting into arguments about how central an example that is (we're probably not launching the whole planet into interstellar space), the minimal requirements are probably way smaller. Earth is in no way optimized for self-replication. VNRs as popularly conceived might not be borderline magical nanotech, they might just be a few megatons of old-fashioned industry adapted for space that take a decade to duplicate. Fortunately, the universe has megatons to spare, let alone years.
I do think this has a few notable differences from the normal depiction of VNRs. The city-sized factory that takes a decade to duplicate itself seems like it's far more likely to have something go wrong, which is a big problem if you're only planning to launch one, and the longer it takes to work the more likely something breaks it before it finishes.
"A factory that works perfectly for 10 years without external human intervention" seems very far from our current technology, despite pretty good incentives to make one.
Though now I really want a Factorio mod that allows you to build space platforms from other space platforms.
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