The tree · Biology · World event · Root: on the scale of the whole window
A treatment is approved that makes people substantially more resistant to chronic space radiation
The long shot on the biology side: rather than stopping the radiation, change the person. Some organisms shrug off doses that would kill us, and a few of the responsible genes and proteins are known. A drug or gene therapy that halves the long-term cancer and tissue damage from chronic cosmic-ray exposure would loosen the mission limits that shielding otherwise has to meet.
What counts as it having happened
A drug or gene therapy is approved by a major regulator, or adopted by a space agency's crew-health standard, with evidence that it reduces the long-term harm from chronic galactic-cosmic-ray-type exposure by half or more.
Settled by: The regulator's approval record or the agency's published crew-health standard
Probability, by longevity scenario
| baseline2071 ± 8 | moderate2080 | strong2095 | radical2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8% | 10% | 15% | 35% | 45% |
Each number is the chance this resolves yes before that scenario's window closes, given that everything it depends on resolves first. Estimated 2026-09-08.
Why these numbers: A preventive therapy for a rare exposure faces an approval bar no current evidence meets, and the biology of chronic heavy-ion harm is not understood; a long shot that only becomes plausible over a century.
How it could happen, and where physics would have to give way
Long shots belong in the tree by the first founding rule; the second says they must be written plausibly all the way to the edge of the impossible, with the mechanism named and the breaking point stated plainly.
The mechanism: Radioprotective drugs already exist for acute exposure (amifostine protects tissue during radiotherapy). Proteins from radiation-tolerant organisms, such as the tardigrade's Dsup, have reduced DNA damage in human cells in the lab, and gene therapies that deliver a single protein are now routine medicine. The step is from lab cells to a therapy shown to cut lifetime cancer risk from chronic heavy-ion exposure, tested first in animals on the station or the Moon.
The breaking point: Nobody knows whether the harm from years of heavy-ion exposure comes mostly from DNA damage, which such proteins address, or from other tissue and vascular effects that they do not. There is no human data on chronic heavy-ion exposure at all, and a preventive therapy given to healthy people for a rare exposure faces an approval bar that no current evidence could meet.
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The record itself is data/B-biology.toml in the public repository.