Adaptation and Specialization

50-year-old Amy Lee awoke to several different alarms going off on her monitoring screen. Yawning, she immediately grabbed the screen before moving on autopilot through her morning routine.

Clothes changed. Dosimeter monitor checked. The popout cabinet hissed as it deposited her daily dose of pills into her hand.

But as she propelled herself to the door, she froze, staring at the screen in hand.

Red alarms showed the quickly climbing levels of radiation were being tracked in the supply room. More red alarms alerted her to 3 others with dangerously high levels of radiation exposure. The RFX1 shielding in the supply wing was failing to keep out extremely high levels of radiation.

RFX1. The polyethylene shield for their spaceship from radiation. The supply wing was the least- protected area of the Vestigo, but still should not have failed.

“Impossible,” Amy muttered. Ionizing galactic cosmic rays, the only possible radiation here, had been accounted for in all previous calculations. In every scenario the radiation team calculated for, the shielding had remained effective at least until they arrived at the end of their 20-year journey on a planet with its own atmospheric shield.

But as of now, it had been 15 years since liftoff had passed and they were nowhere near close to the planet. They had just left their own solar system.

Confused and a little panicked, Amy blocked off the supply wing per procedure rules and then sat all passengers down in the radiation control room, the room with the thickest walls. As the director of radiation control, she was in charge.

Amy checked the other wings, confirming what she already suspected. All wings contained high levels of radiation. Even the safety room was experiencing slightly larger levels than normal.

“This shouldn’t be happening, this shouldn’t be happening,” Amy muttered to herself. Feeling her mind start to panic, she raced through protocol with her passengers.

“The rules say after putting ship on lockdown, we should put up more RFX1 to make the walls thicker. Block more radiation,” Amy said.

“Done,” Cady Johnson responded shakily. “It’s been two hours, and radiation levels are still through the roof.”

“Did we put everything we have on?” Amy asked. “Yes, director. Everything,” Cady shot back.

Amy stared down at the binder in her hands with a sinking feeling in her stomach. The next step read “return to nearest station immediately,” but the Vestigo had passed the last station 10 years ago. They just didn’t have enough fuel to return. And if they chose to turn the ship back into a radiation-safe zone, they would end up running out of oxygen and dying in space.

“Moving on,” Amy muttered to herself. “Next… any biomedical experts? Do we have medications other than the daily doses to counteract the effects of long-term radiation?”

The normally cheery Emily Smith grimaced. “Yes, we have the radioprotectants, but we’re not going to have enough for everyone for five years. They were meant for cancer patients.”
Everyone sat there for a while, silent and unsure of what to do.

“Guys, I’ve been looking at the dosimeters for a while,” Cady broke the silence. “And take a look at this. The physical dosimeters aren’t identifying protons and HZE particles coming in directly, which would indicate galactic cosmic rays. They’re identifying smaller particles that are interact--”

“There must be some form of secondary radiation,” Amy speculated, her heart beating faster and faster. “I thought our walls were thick enough to contain them!”

She could hear people hyperventilating, and all she could think of were the fruit flies they tested on Earth. As a college student, she had flipped through the images of horribly mutated DNA and casually discussed possible solutions for the next batch. All of her solutions had failed to block the radiation.

Amy Lee stood up quickly and paced the room. Her body felt numb and her head was buzzing.

“Protocol. Protocol. Protocol,” she chanted under her breath as she felt her mind start to panic. “Lockdown. Supplies. Return. Medicine.”

As she walked around to check supplies, the Vestigo’s passengers stood up with her and grabbed books off the shelves.

“We’ll go through our own procedures. I’m sure there’s something here,” Cady whispered.

Amy went through procedures again. She followed the rules. She checked supplies. She looked for a return station.

“Protocol. Protocol. Protocol,” Amy muttered under her breath. All of a sudden, Amy looked up.

“Protocol,” she frowned and then concentrated.

She had run through protocol over a dozen times now. Protocol was clearly not solving any of their problems, problems that would kill them soon if she didn’t buckle up.

Engineers adapt to the situation they’re in. The Vestigo was dealing with something Amy had no experience with, and as a result, she could not rely on procedures based on their previous research.

There were no scientific journals she could look up, or experts she could ask, or test trials she could run. She was going to have to do the best she could with what she and the passengers did know, and learn on-the-fly for the rest.

With this realization, Amy sat down with a thud.

“Get back,” Amy barked. “We’re starting over. Toss those binders in the corner and get off your databases for now.”

The Vestigo’s passengers, wide-eyed, sat around her.

“This is a new situation that we haven’t dealt with before, so we’re going to start with the problem and address the problem directly. I can’t think of solutions, so I want us ALL to suggest some possible ones.”

A little girl piped up first. “Land on another planet? Closer planet?”

“Sorry, closest one is the planet we’re heading. At the rate of radiation exposure, we’re going to be dead by then.”

Encouraged by the girl, others contributed. “Thicker walls?”

“Essential oils?”

“We could try to propel ourselves faster. Do we have enough fuel?” An old woman was the last to speak up.

“What if…” she hesitated. “Could we make our own magnetosphere? Like Earth’s and our new planet’s… but just for our ship? Wouldn’t that protect us from radiation?”

“That’s an old idea. We have never experimented with such a--” Amy responded automatically and then stopped.

She bolted up. So did Cady and Emily.

“Can you tell us a little more about that?” Amy asked.

“I remember reading about it. We could set up a magnetic field to deflect radioactive particles. We can run some tests with smaller magnets and calculate the energy needed,” the lady answered.
Amy rolled up her sleeves. “Let’s get to work.”

She paced around the room as passengers sent out small delivery robots to pick up the necessary components for their magnet creation

“We’re never going to finish this project if we do it this slowly,” Amy thought. “But we’ve never done anything out of our screens before.”

Amy shook her head at herself and moved towards the groups of people.

“Alright! Guys, let’s split up into teams to construct different parts of this. We’ll all work together, but we’re going to need Team 1 to gather all necessary supplies, Team 2 to run tests with the smaller magnets we already have, Team 3 to formulate the location of the magnets around the ship…” Amy went around and helped people join different teams.

She sat down with her own team to come up with any possible problems they could run into.

After mere seconds, the same little girl piped up again. “The magnetic shield could cause us pain. It would probably kill us.”

A member of the supply team immediately suggested, “An inner magnetic shield? We’re already in this small room, and we can drag our supplies in. We can neutralize the magnetic field for this room, and hope that our supplies won’t be too negatively affected.”

This was it. Problems, suggestions, solutions, and adaptations.

As another passenger presented her calculations on the amount of energy needed to power such an enormous magnetic field, others tossed out whatever came to mind.

Eventually, they decided on using superconducting wires in addition to burning through some backup fuel. From there, the work progressed smoothly.

Not smoothly in terms of lack of problems, but no one panicked. No one shut down.

Instead, the passengers worked on developing medicines, testing the magnetic fields, and designing new things.

After a week with radiation, those aboard the Vestigo completed their creation of the magnetic field. They flipped the switch and waited.

After only a short while, Amy looked up at the room and opened her mouth as the room quieted. She smiled.

“We’re going to make it.”

Engineer's Note:

As the Vestigo explores new territory, passengers have to be prepared for obstacles humanity has never experienced before. My suggested system of education is built on solving potential problems. Two key points are specialization and adaptation.
 
After confirming mastery of fundamental skills (eg. basic math, reading, writing, etc.), passengers on the Vestigo will join teams that focus on different areas critical to their survival. For example, one team will focus on maintaining food supply while another team will work on protecting the ship from radiation.

People of all different ages, genders, races, and other categories will be part of the team they choose. As they are forced to solve different problems on their journey, they will learn the necessary principles/concepts and also discover new ones.

This is specialization, which is especially important when there is such a variety of ways for their journey to go wrong. Not only will the Vestigo focus down on survival needs, the teams will become experts in a specific area.

Another key emphasis for my proposal is adaptation, defined here as changing strategy quickly according to a new situation’s conditions. Deep space is such a new discovery, and humans know little to nothing about it. Those on the Vestigo will have to adapt quickly to their situations to survive the unknown dangers of deep space.

To encourage adaptation, teams will practice working in imaginary situations with random, inexplainable, computer-generated issues that crop up every so often. The effectiveness of this is limited, but it prioritizes adaptation.

Annotated Bibliography

Dunbar, Brian. “Space Radiation Health Project.” NASA, NASA, 1 Feb. 2020, www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/postsecondary/features/F_Space_Radiation_Project.html. This source explains one of the main issues with space exploration, which is the effects of deep space radiation.

No Author Available. “Space Radiation.” NASA, NASA, 1 Feb. 2020, www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/space_radiation_ebook.pdf.
This source discusses the types of radiation, and possible solutions to counteract the effects of space radiation.

Parker, Eugene N. “Shielding Space.” Dartmouth, Scientific American, 2006, www.dartmouth.edu/~sshepherd/research/Shielding/docs/Parker_06.pdf. This source describes the known ways humans may be able to stop radiation.