alt Hacker NewsSpace is, and I must emphasize this in the strongest possible terms, really FUCKING BIG and dangerous GRBs tend to be tightly focused given the inverse square law.
It's highly unlikely that a ship gets hit by a GRB.
On the other hand, general radiation gets worse the faster you go, so you need shielding either way. All you have to do is line the walls of your ship with a shit ton of water, which can be mined in space.
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arbuge • yesterday at 7:47 PM
> All you have to do is line the walls of your ship with a shit ton of water, which can be mined in space.
But that water needs to be encased in something, and your problem now becomes protecting the encasement.
cdelsolar • yesterday at 4:26 PM
Can you really mine water in interstellar space, how? there’s not that many asteroids just floating out there, I think.
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I'm reminded of the joke that the most dangerous thing in the ocean is all the water.
We don't have fuel sources that can run long enough for the trip, and deep space won't have enough solar radiation. We would need reliable mining spots along the way to replace metals made brittle by exposure or punctured by micro asteroids.
Even travelling at 1% the speed of light, stray hydrogen atoms become a problem. Not counting acceleration or deceleration time, that would be over 400 years just to get to the nearest star, let alone one with a habitable planet.