i just did some rough engineering/math to figure out how to build domes to live in. Assumption of course is inside pressure p = 0.2 bar.
- Assuming that you want to source as much construction material as possible on-site (In-Situ Resource Utilization), simple materials like Polyethylene might be advantageous to more complex materials like carbon nanofiber etc
- Polyethylene can be processed at temperatures around 200°C, while steel would have to be heated to 1500°C. Especially in the early days, plastics are clearly cheaper than steel. Let’s see whether we can get away with it:
A room-sized dome (i.e. sphere, but only the upper half, with sphere-radius r = 10 m, so maximum diameter d = 20 m if you cut at half height) with inside pressure p = 0.2 bar would require a thickness d = 6.66 cm roughly, if it’s made of PE. That does not sound undoable! In fact, that sounds entirely reasonable and doable.
There’s a third, less well-done page:
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the thing with the radiation is a rumor. low-dose long-time radiation exposure is less harmful than the same dose of radiation in a short time frame. consider how drinking 10 L of alcohol in a day would surely kill you, but drinking the same amount over 10 years would barely be noticeable (that’s one small beer each weekend).
check out the article Linear no-threshold model for a discussion of this. while for high radiation doses, cancer risk linearly increases with dosage, for lower doses that is much less clear. Check out this article about splitting up doses to reduce damages for example, or Radiation hormesis for a list of studies of long-term low-level radiation incidents.
Notably mars has about 30x the background radiation compared to earth (source: NASA and this XKCD chart). Meanwhile the Kerala study from here (where people on average get 80x the normal background radiation) show no elevated cancer rates.
Eh… It’s still definitely not good for you.
yeah there’s too little data to actually conclude on the health effects for now. we’ll probably know more in 100 years (at the latest). anyways, point is that it doesn’t kill you with a 90% chance or sth, and probably all things considered my guess is that the risk is probably small enough to justify building the houses on the surface directly.
but yeah, we’ll see.