[ExI] Maximum Jailbreak, and the legacy of Stephen Hawking

[John Clark]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 12:42 PM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

>
>> My question about living in space:  what do you do about the radiation
>> for the long term?
>
>
> > Simple, you genetically engineer your space humans to be black. Not African
> black and not just the skin, but pitch-black and including the internal
> organs.
>

That would give you some protection against ultraviolet light and maybe
even a little against soft X rays but no protection at all against the most
dangerous and hard to shield against type of radiation which isn't
electromagnetic at all, its high speed particles in the form of Cosmic
Rays. A single proton can be moving so fast it has as much energy as a
baseball thrown by a major league pitcher, and when a high speed proton
hits something it produces billions of mesons (a particle almost the same
as a electron except it has 208 times the mass), and mesons can penetrate
hundreds and even thousands of feet of solid rock.

Mesons are the reason they went to the trouble and expense of building the
LHC in a tunnel 570 feet underground, to protect people from the mesons
that were produced there whenever the protons accelerated there hit
something. A few years ago there was talk about building a machine that
would accelerate mesons instead of protons or electrons, it would have a
lot of advantages but was decided to be just too dangerous, they wouldn't
be able to bury the machine deep enough to be safe.

 John K Clark
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