Active Sheilding Forum: Spacesettlers
Thread: Active Sheilding
# 203 byian.woollard@... on Dec. 22, 2000, 4:55 a.m.
Member since 2021-10-03
bill t wrote:
The main problem with active shielding is that it doesn't
work. Period.
> You can arrange a magnetic field to deflect the electrons, but I'm
> wondering what the weight of the material, and the power utilization
> is. All the power is heat that has to be radiated away. This means
> more radiators.
Radiators aren't a problem. The problem is that people die
from radiation poisoning (10% chance of cancer per 5-10 years
if I remember correctly), caused by cosmic rays. Active shielding
doesn't touch cosmic rays- they're waaaay too high energy. We
can't even produce rays that powerful in our particle
accelerators that are miles across and use whole power
stations to keep them running; active shielding
has absolutely no chance of even deflecting it,
and quite a lot of the particles aren't even charged
anyway.
6 foot of just about anything non radioactive works wonders.
If a lunar mass driver is used that's not ridiculous.
I worked out about $100/ft^2 ballpark. Getting some
near earth asteroids should be cheaper still (some
of them have delta-vs of tens of meters - yes that's
right meters not kilometers, per second.)
Living in asteroids will be much cheaper. Shoring up the
inside of an asteriod you've mined out is pretty simple and cheap
in microgravity.
You get the outside for free pretty much. You don't have to
move anything anywhere, just tie the rubble down, smelt your
aluminium and sling up some big mirrors and put a sign outside
'home sweet home'.