ElectronCharge

For those who might wonder (like I did), this article was published June 6, 1999.

As to 'shielding', there's plenty on Mars. It's called dirt and rock. There's a high likelihood that caves are available, for one thing. In the short term, other needs may be satisfied via shipment from Earth. The initial colony can be scouted, supplied, and constructed using unmanned missions.

Longer term habitation will involve Martian agriculture. Microbes have already been developed to transform Martian soil into an arable form.

Back to the radiation question, after some quick research it's clear that as long as the living quarters are shielded (as above), a few hours of exposure a day are very low risk. The average dose rate at the Martian surface is well under 220 micrograys per day, and the levels only very rarely exceed that value. If one were out on the surface for five hours a day, the yearly dose would be less than that allowed for radiation workers in the USA. That level is considered negligible for increased cancers and other health problems.

Given that survival is assured, what's there is a new world, virtually unlimited resources, and unlimited potential.

Radiation exposure will be easily survivable in the short term. Astronauts have already lived in space for longer than a Mars flight, and Mars explorers will have, at a minimum, highly shielded sleep areas during the trip. With a VR setup, spending a lot of time there might not be too bad...

Spaceflight oriented radiation shielding will also improve over time.

On Mars, radiation won't be much of a concern at all, since all living quarters will be underground, either under piled regolith, or deeper underground.

You're uninformed.

Humans on Mars will live in radiation shielded environments, and people have already endured longer space radiation exposure than received during the trip. At least the astronaut's sleeping habitat will be heavily radiation shielded on board the spacecraft.

Nuclear interplanetary craft will also shorten trip times appreciably within a decade or so.

See my other reply for more details...

Most of what you wrote is provably incorrect.

Humans have survived in orbit, exposed to full-strength cosmic rays, for much longer than for the trip to Mars. Improved shielding will become practical as nuclear powered spacecraft come into their heyday, which will be sooner than you think. I believe that within ten years, nuclear transporters will be receiving Starships for docking, then making the trip to Mars substantially faster than using Hohmann type orbits.

Once on Mars, life will be mostly underground due to the high background radiation. Most surface activity will be via teleoperated robots, though surface vehicles should have enough shielding to be safe. Short excursions in suits should be fine too, subject to a yearly radiation dose limit.

Life underground can be as luxurious as effectively unlimited energy and resources can provide. Very large underground habitats can eventually be excavated, perhaps with the assistance of nuclear explosions. Large lava caves are also known to exist, and may provide sites for early settlements. Regardless, radiation exposure will absolutely NOT be an issue.

Martian gravity, while fun, may pose physiological issues. It may be necessary to construct large centrifuges providing some higher effective gravity level for some portion of Martian's days. Perhaps sleeping in those conditions will be sufficient, more research is needed for sure. I do think a large orbital hotel with simulated gravity would be a great SpaceX project, both for space tourism and research. It's a shame NASA has dropped the ball on simulated gravity for decades...

At any rate, the future is incredibly bright, and the spirit of human exploration will live on! I'm excited for the first Starship orbital flight in a few minutes!!!

Possibly interestingly, I can't take you seriously for having such a superficial approach.

You probably shouldn't cut off your nose to spite your face.

Does anyone know if the non-colorized version of this is available? I'd like to see this as a Mars explorer actually would...

I'm in the same category, but GPU support is definitely interesting too. The idea of offloading intensive processing to the GPU has its merits.

(A) Mojo is intended to be a more ergonomic Rust, with Pythonic syntax, and much faster compilation.

(B) Mojo supports multiple GPU types, including AMD, Apple, and whatever may come along. That's one of its major selling points over CUDA. It's also targeted at other novel hardware accelerators etc.

Mojo and Julia have some very fundamental differences though...

Mojo is a fully ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled systems language. Julia is much more dynamic, and its AOT compilation story is still quite weak. Mojo also has explicit memory management, unlike Julia and its real time unfriendly garbage collector.

Mojo also has the concept of ownership, similar to Rust, while Julia does not.

Mojo is being pitched as an efficient, general purpose, Pythonic systems language which can target a variety of hardware types. That seems like a good target to me, I hope it's successful!

One thing to keep an eye on is whether or not a Windows port emerges after it's open sourced...

If it's open sourced, Qualcomm won't need to worry about Metal support. If Mojo is popular enough, Apple might get involved. If not, no doubt there'll still be Apple users that want Mojo support, and are willing to work to get it.

Look at the Asahi Linux effort, for instance...

One is an objective measurement, the other is a completely subjective judgement.

As they say, there's no accounting for taste...

You're absolutely wrong on both points in my case.

I've driven many "real sports cars", and I'm not not just "posting numbers from the Tesla spec sheets", my Model Y is my daily driver.

Ironically, you're the one "projecting".