Yeah, like the substrate of Deinococcus radiodurans, Thermococcus gammatolerans, tardigrades and the rest of the organic radioresistant folk.
If you ask me, Charlie seriously underestimates the power of biological enhancement. As I said before, people who could create cell-like "mechanocytes" could also make themselves radioresistant.
]]>Electrochemically-powered meatsacks like me and thee wouldn't suffer the degradation of consciousness exhibited by Freya and her Android Jelly Baby chums but the instant overproduction of cancerous cells and destruction of our immune system would cause us to shut down quite quickly afterwards absent miracletech medical repair functions.
That's what the crew in Peter Watts' Blindsight have to do to explore a hellishly radio and magneto active alien structure that keeps frying all their drones. The book is online to read under CC on the author's site, btw
It's a bit hard to find so here's a direct link http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
]]>10 years ago, I did ~ 9,500 fiction novel-start words in 12 hours, but I don't think I could keep that up for a week.
(2003 talk.bizarre Fail to Suck Day entry...)
]]>WRT interstellar colonization, it's fairly obviously a highly risky job, in a universe that doesn't supply us with magic wands (faster than light drives, or cheap and easy conversion of mass into directed energy, for example).
The Freyaverse is just sufficiently hospitable to permit interstellar travel -- largely because humanity 2.0 is a hell of a lot more robust than we are -- with about the difficulty level of a 17th or early-to-mid 18th century circumnavigation of the globe. In other words, a 20% hull loss rate is to be expected (with no survivors, under these circumstances). Roughly equivalent to Apollo Program levels of risk.
I will note that the Magnetar pulse that hits the Lansford Hastings is a less-than-a-billion-to-one contingency -- far less likely than a nearby supernova, which is itself pretty improbable. If the ship carried human beings, they'd all be killed instantly: cause of death wouldn't be ribonucleotide cross-linkage and breakage but actual gross disruption of tertiary and quaternary structure of enzymes. The crew would be pretty much coagulated like hard boiled eggs. (Very hot hard boiled eggs: 30 kilograys corresponds to dumping 30 kJ of energy into each kilogram of their bodies.) Moreover, the specified radiation dose -- 30,000 grays on the hull surface -- would be sufficient to kill the gut bacteria carried by the human 1.0 meatsacks; to kill tardigrades: to kill over 90% of a sample Deinococcus Radiodurans bacteria.
]]>Only seven degrees C hotter (30 kJ is approximately 7 kCal). Agreed, it's very evenly delivered heat, and I can quite expect proteins to be coagulated all the way through and you or I would be very dead as a result. But overall, it's only a few hours output of normal metabolism — the real problem is that it's instantaneous with no chance for cooling before it's too late.
]]>(Ignoring poor sods being cooked in industrial microwaves and the like - but their surface energy is a lot higher.)
Without that long-slope damage, I guess the body's own cooling mechanisms might to be able to get the temperature under control fast enough to save the life.
But this is a little like saying that someone falling 10 km into the ocean should be OK if they can swim - as you point out, the protein degradation due to the ionising radiation is going to be the biggie.
I wonder: has anyone considered using this for cooking? The concept of the 'cold boiled egg' is one that might interest Heston Blumenthal.
]]>You could probably pick up that dose if you stood in the beam line of a serious particle accelerator like the LHC: the amount of energy in a pulse from the LHC is allegedly sufficient to blow a hole in the evacuated cryogenically cooled pipeline it runs in if one of the superconducting electromagnets fails.
But most conditions which would expose you to that level of radiation will be very rapidly fatal from other causes.
]]>Like the person worrying about swimming home after dropping from an airliner at cruise altitude.
We're into perfect spherical cow territory here, trying to divorce the pulse's effect on the body from secondary issues like how much induced radioactivity there'll be in the surrounding material.
Though there is Anatoli Bugorski:
As it was believed that he had received far in excess of the radiation dose that would normally kill a person, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow where the doctors could observe his expected demise. However, Bugorski survived and even completed his Ph.D
Despite which, it is still considered generally inadvisable to stick your head in the path of a particle accelerator.
]]>Turns out, it is. One of the characters in "Neptune's Brood" suffers from the same fate (loss of higher mental functions, ravenous hunger) as the crew in "Bit Rot", and it is mentioned as a known condition. And page 163 of US edition has a direct reference to events of "Bit Rot" -- calling them a "memorable incident". Which means something had survived.
]]>First of, I guess we're talking about "soft gamma repeaters", as explained in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_gamma_repeater
There is an article about those at:
http://www2011.mpe.mpg.de/363-heraeus-seminar/Contributions/3Wednesday/morning/KHurley.pdf
As we can see on page 7, there is hardly any radiation left above 300 keV, where
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_radioactivity
says the minimum for induced radioactivity by gamma rays is 2 MeV, which would mean the gamma rays are not a likely source for transmuting radiation. Of course, there are quite some neutrons, alpha rays and heavy nuclei around, problem is, the have mass, so the will be somewhat slower than light. Let's assume the have 99.999%, which for a proton would mean something like 2.10 TeV according to
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/716/relativistic-speed-energy-relation-is-this-correct
I guess for lead nuclei, it would be in excess of the 574 TeV the LHC reaches.
That still means that the gamma rays are about 1.00001 times as fast as the nucleons. So, let's assume the magnetar is 100 light years away. This means the nucleons reach the ship after 100.001 years, about 0.001 years later than the mostly harmless gamma pulse. Or 0.00136524 = 8.76 hours later. Plenty of time to get people into the water tanks. If we get further away, the time becomes longer, closer up, time for preparations goes down. So maybe I'm wrong, but I guess the sudden exposition means the source was somewhat closer than 9000 light years, pre-strike warning about a month before.
Actually, the same might be true for the radiation dose; if we go for the most energetic gamma burst in 2004,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR_1806-20
there is a calculation in an amateur astronomical magazine
http://www.sterne-und-weltraum.de/alias/pdf/suw-2005-05-s100-pdf/834182
with the solution in
http://www.sterne-und-weltraum.de/alias/pdf/suw-2005-07-s100-pdf/833894
which says the dosage for the ISS was about 0.02 mSv.
Now the ISS is quite close to earth, and if we want to show hownig the exposition might have been on an interstellar spaceship, it might help looking at comparative radiation hazards in space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays
the exposition per year is 150 mSv for the ISS, while Apollo and Skylab got about three times the radiation the ISS gets. Going to Mars would leave the protection by earth's magnetic field etc. behind, but we would still be somewhat below one sievert a year.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6136/1080.abstract
And in the interstellar medium, according to
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0610030.pdf
for a non-relativistic spaceship, we get about 35 rads/year, or about 350 mSv/year, which is lower than the estimate for the Mars mission.
So, to get some big numbers, let's say the the ISS gets 100 mSv/year, while in interstellar medium it's about 1 Sv/year. Which means a factor of 10 for protection by the heliosphere, earth magnetosphere etc.
Which means that without those, dosage for the ISS would have been 0.2 mSv. which is high, but not that high, about the amount of an X-ray, according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(radiation)
Now, the burst in question was 50,000 light years away.
At 9000 light years, or 9000/50000 of this distance, we'd get about (50000/9000)^2 = 31 times this amount, or 6 mSv. Or a chest CT.
To get into Deinococcus radiodurans territory or the 30,000 grays mentioned, well, let's assume 30,000 grays are 30,000 Sievert, so we would need about 150,000,000 times the dosage at 50,000 light years. Or about 122478^2 the dosage, which mea.s we'd have to be about 4 light years away.
Which fits somewhat with the idea a soft gamma repeater in 10 light years distance would doom the earth by destroying the ozone layer.
BTW, 4 light years gives you about 0.00004 years warning time, or about 21 minutes. Not enough to get all hand on deck, I suppose.
Er, as always, biologist speaking here, if any mathematicians or physicist or whatever want to flay me over this, no hesitation...
]]>The story does mention the ship being hit from an angle that more harshly irradiated one side than the other.
]]>