That is, of course, for a given radiation dose, which is independent of body cross section - which is relevant in real-world scenarios. If we assume an isotropic radiation exposure profile, an average male height of 174cm, an average female height of 161 cm, and asssume an equivalent profile, then a man presents a 17% higher profile to radiation exposurediation exposure, so if a woman has a 50% higher (150%) cancer risk, then it's only 29% higher for a fixed radiation flux per square meter.

However, let's look further at this. Given the smaller size of members of a female crew, you can shrink the spacecraft occupant space by 8% on each axis, or a volumetric decrease of 26%. Mass changes are more difficult to reckon. Life support, food, water, etc is dependent on metabolism, which the article shows is dramatically lower for women in space. Fuel needs are proportional to all other mass issues. Only a few things (such as computers and scientific equipment) don't trace back to crew member size and mass. Regardless, for a given launch weight, it's clear that you can afford the mass of a significantly increased amount of radiation shielding for a female crew due to the weight savings elsewhere, probably easily more than offsetting the cancer risk.

Beyond this, the average US astronaut age is 34, an age well after when most women are done having children (assuming that they even want to have children). Given that the article states the risk is from breast, ovarian, and utirine cancer, I wouldn't be surprised if many would consider full hysterectomy for the ability to travel to Mars.

I love the fact that Mars is the only planet known to man that is solely inhabited by robots

Despite how radical that statement sounds, it's actually perfectly reasonable for a zero-G environment. They're not only dead weight, they're also in the way and make you require larger accomodations.

Even in Mars's gravity field a legless person would deal quite well, at least inside the facility (picture how easily you could get around without your legs if you suddenly were given 2.5x the arm strength, didn't have your legs weighing you down, and on top of that add in how most double amputees already have good arm strength to begin with). They should be able to "hop" with their arms all the way to a 2 1/2 meter ceiling without trouble, and the full arc would take a good two seconds to come back down. On the moon it'd be even easier. Of course, if they're legless, why would they even need such tall ceilings to begin with?

Citation so we know what you're talking about?

I agree. If by "poisoning" they mean people making insolts or dispatching flying penises in Second Life or stuff like that, then it's a bill too far. But if by "poisoning" they mean launching flickering images on an epilepsy forum to try to cause seizures, "doxxing", making legitimate rape and murder threats, etc, then I think it's absolutely justified. All too often is there the assumption that what happens online doesn't warrant enforcement, even if it's something that crosses over into the real world.

Everyone has the right to free speech, but it ceases being free speech when it crosses certain bounds (shouting fire in a crowded theatre, incitement to violence, solicitation of criminal activity, etc). All of these cases are nuanced and require careful balance, but what they should not be is ignored.

Exactly what I'm thinking. I respect peer-reviewed research, and take results seriously - preferably consensus positions, but on lesser researched topics, individual studies. But isn't this pretty useless without more details? Is it sugar consumption? Then diet soda doesn't count. Is it phosphate consumption? Then are all kinds of other foods also a threat? Is it caffeine? If so, then coffee is a threat and caffeine-free soda is fine. Is it other lesser ingredients, such as certain flavorants or colorants? What element in their test soda is so harmful that it has such a dramatic effect? Surely it's not all ingredients, or the act of consuming them at once...

Wrong. I said mass manufacture - you don't have to re-engineer curiosity from scratch and hand-build it every time. And if you can pay to build a super-heavy-lift vehicle, or tons of smaller (but still very large) launches to get your ~100 tonne manned Mars round trip spacecraft into orbit, then you can launch a 100x 889kg curiosity rovers.

You literally can launch about 100 mass-manufactured curiosity-sized rovers for the cost of one manned mission. The scientific bang for your buck is way, way, way higher with robots.

And FYI, if your goal is to be able to help people "live on another planet", then you absolutely should not be supporting wasting money on a trip to Mars on today's way overpriced launch systems. You should be supporting spending it on developing novel systems for orders-of-magnitude reduction of launch prices, be they scramjets, launch loops, coilguns, metastable fuels, nuclear thermal propulsion, or in general insert-your-favorite-potential-cost-reducer-here, so that it doesn't cost an impractical amount of money to send people there. (never mind that we're not even centuries away from being able to recreate a full self-sustainable tech tree on Mars.. see earlier in the thread)

I always find it funny to hear people the same alt-space fanboys complaining vitriolically about how maintaining ISS is a huge waste of money but then insisting that we set up a manned outpost that would cost orders of magnitude more to maintain ;)

I get my view of how the lower class is treated by the cops, from watching the TV show "Cops".

Understandable, then why you hold your views of the poor.

Generally the poor are poor because they make bad choices.

Some people, true, but not generally. If you're raised by poor parents, you're up against a very big wall. It's hard for them to buy school supplies, and if you're raised by a single parent it's harder for them to help you because they're probably working two jobs. Having a single parent is the result of a poor choice, but it wasn't your poor choice.

And a poor kid can forget ever attending college.

People who have bills to pay and have to go to work in the morning don't have time to be out causing trouble.

Most of the US's poor work, and are not criminals. But the cops still treat them as criminals; hell, society itself does.

Those folks working at McDonald's, WalMart, the corner convenience store are all on food stamps. That friendly face you see at the checkout counter is the face of poverty, not the idiots you see while watching "Cops" (that show is government propaganda, BTW).

So we are a classless society, in that you're not stuck in one socioeconomic class no matter how hard you work.

Rags to riches is extremely rare and takes a hell of a lot more than hard work. My late uncle was one of the exceptions. Creativity and hand-eye coordination runs in the family, and a stroke of bad luck was the best thing that happened to Dan.

He was injured in WWII in the navy, and became friends with a fellow patient in the hospital who had lost a leg in the war. The army gave him a prosthetic, and Dan saw it and said "I can make a better leg than that" when his friend showed him the new leg, and he did. They went into the prosthetics business, and all it took to sell one was for Dan's partner to talk to a recent amputee, who would invariably say "What could YOU possibly know about it?" All he had to do was pull up his pants leg and it was an instant sale, because you would never know that he was missing a limb.

But there were so many lucky breaks, including genetics, that his rags to riches story (both sets of my grandparents were poor all their lives) would not have happened had a single thing, especially meeting his future partner, who was a born salesman; that's something that doesn't run in the family. We couldn't sell a ten cent hamburger to a starving man.

The fact is, if you're born poor you're almost certain to die poor, and if you're born rich you're almost certain to die rich. If you're born middle class there's no telling; you could die rich, middle class, or poor.

If this society is as classless as you say, then why did no one spend a single day in jail over the banking crimes that brought down the economy? Why did no one from Sony go to prison over XCP? Why was OJ Simpson "not guilty"? Do you think a poor black man would have been treated the same? Hell, a poor white man would have gone to prison under those circumstances.

What "all purpose robot"? A robot or person's capabilities are limited by what scientific equipment they have on hand, not by whether they can digest corn or catch a cold. I'm talking about a robot like Curiosity. A person could mass-manufacture and dispatch a hundred Curiosity rovers to every corner of Mars for the cost of one manned mission and would collect dozens of times more data.

Ref. It took 30 seconds. Please don't ask other people to use Google for you, you're (presumedly) an adult and should be able to manage these sort of things on your own.

But in order to avoid thermalizing your fission fragments the reaction is going to need to be in near-vacuum

The reaction is done in a near vacuum. But that doesn't mean that there's almost no fuel. Fission fragments and neutrons behave totally differently, fission fragments are positively charged and respect Lorenz force, neutrons are neutral and do not, so it's easy to separate the two (as well as from the fuel, which becomes negatively charged and is not moving at relativistic velocities).

These things have been fully simulated, there's nothing unreasonable about them.

but our best neutron mirrors can only get total reflectance at angles of incidence of less than a single degree

I have no clue where this is coming from. Neutron reflectors (more properly thought of as scatterers) can scatter back, and in fact moderators produce a relatively anisotropic thermal neutron flux. The current proposal for a dusty fission fragment reactor involves U235 fuel and a moderator in the shell of the reactor.

Oh please, be serious. It's humans running the robots who make the decisions. The only benefit a human on Mars has is latency. But that's a really silly benefit, given that there's no urgency to get the data and just travel there takes months and the limiting factor on how much data you'll collect overall is how long your scientific equipment lasts. And no, an astronaut on Mars isn't going to be repairing a broken mass spectrometer or the like, it's a silly concept. And it'd, as noted, be orders of magnitude cheaper just to send a second robot.

I am correct, look it up if you don't believe me. The energy is primarily in the form of fission fragments. And no, chain reactions work exactly the same, the neutronicity doesn't vary. You're confusing fission fragments and neutrons.

I don't have anything backwards. As far as solar sails go, interplanetary travel is short distance.

The thrust is really, really, really tiny, for really, really, really huge sails.

I don't know, I hadn't heard of them. Thanks for the heads-up, I'll give it a try!