To Put It Plainly, The Radiation In Space Will Mess You Up
Space looks empty and serene, but it’s a chaotic hellscape of radiation. In addition to cancer-causing solar ejaculations, astronauts are bombarded by cosmic rays, produced by the cataclysmic deaths of stars that dwarf the Sun — stars so big and mean they play keep-away with the Sun’s Ninja Turtles lunch pail. When they explode, they launch protons and nuclei from heavy elements, like iron, at nearly the speed of light. These microscopic cannonballs obliterate any atom in their way, which spells bad news for astronauts, who are made of atoms.
The various types of radiation pass through the skin and rupture DNA, with less resistance than a Pentagon-funded drone strike tearing through the plaster walls of a beloved neighborhood bakery. Radiation shielding is clunky and heavy, and therefore expensive to boot into space. So scientists have creatively enlisted the help of an extremophile fungus, Cladosporium sphaerospermum. It lives in one of Earth’s deadliest places: Chernobyl. Not the town, but in the goddamn ruined reactors themselves. And it doesn’t just survive, it thrives. The fungus uses a roided-out version of photosynthesis, radiosynthesis, to convert radiation into chemical energy. And it’s about damn time it starts earning its keep.
Researchers calculated that an 8-inch-thick layer of fungus could negate an entire annual radiation dose on Mars, which is 66-times greater than on Earth, where we’re protected by an atmosphere and magnetic field. And fungus is cheap, light, and self-replicating; colonists only need to carry a pinch of it into space and then grow it out once on Mars. Combined with a plentiful local resource, Martian regolith (or soil), a fungal-mud-shield just 3.5 inches thick could provide adequate protection on the cheap, so space colonists can save their Martian fun-bucks for the Skee-Ball machines.
Space Life Constantly Introduces New Medical Problems
Collectively, humans have spent several decades in space, both on the International Space Station and in secret Soviet Moon gulags. Still, new health issues constantly pop up to fluster cosmic explorers. And in 2019, astronauts discovered another lethal cosmic complication: blood clots.
“Nonono. We said blood CLOTS.”
A study used ultrasound to track astronauts’ circulation as it passed through the left jugular vein in the neck, which collects blood from the brain. Six of the eleven astronauts displayed stagnant blood flow, which sloshed back and forth, or reverse blood flow, which traveled (the wrong way) up toward the brain faster than those “return this nickel to feed a child” letters travel to the trash. The study also revealed, for the first time, a jugular vein blood clot in one of the astronauts. Fortunately, blood thinners were able to shrink the clot, which fully dissolved back on terra firma.
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