how to explore the solar system without the unhealthy glow

Scientists may have just figured out how to create a radiation shield for deep space.

Space, the final frontier, the place we want to one day explore until our species either succumbs to extinction, or evolves into bizarre new ones. It's a place of unknown and boundless potential. Except for the vast distances between planets and stars. And all the energy required to cross them. And all the research we still need to do so humans can venture into deep space. And all the radiation, which will limit any mission to four years before irreversible damage to our immune system even if we ever figure out full blown interstellar travel with relativistic rockets or warp drives.

But now there's a solution to that last one. A team of researchers found how to create an invulnerable shield against cosmic rays and solar storms, and it's surprisingly, well, as simple as one could hope it to be. Just get a lot of electrons, apply a magnetic field of 70 Tesla, and boom! You'll have an exotic superfluid impervious to radiation flowing around the currents of the magnetic field.

Now, of course, there are some catches. First, this electron soup can't carry charges anymore. Secondly, getting up to 70 Tesla requires a fair bit of power considering that your typical fridge magnet gets a whopping 0.005 Tesla, and the strongest commonly available magnets for industrial uses max out at 1.4 Tesla. If you want a more powerful magnetic field, you'll need electromagnets, the strongest of which reaches 100 T but needs megajoules of energy for 15 millisecond bursts.

Still, all things considered, this is all very promising. If we can replicate this material in subsequent studies, figure out the most efficient superconductor to help generate at least 70 T magnetic fields for prolonged periods of time, and find a power source that could support this setup — most likely nuclear reactors already considered for plasma propulsion and ion drives meant for interplanetary travel — then all of a sudden, we'll be capable of sending humans much farther and with much lower health risks.

This is all well within the realm of possibility, albeit at the extreme end of what we can do now, and requiring significant funding to turn into something that we can launch to the Moon and beyond. Yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO, superconductors show potential for improvements on existing technology, and space nuclear was slated for a slow and careful revival as it was.

Even the lack of charge across these powerful magnetic fields is actually a bonus, as on smaller scales, it opens the door to sending data not by charge as we do today, but by hijacking the spin of the electrons. This would let us take advantage of a quantum phenomenon which allows us to pack a lot more data into far fewer particles and their interactions, giving the same mechanism used to protect astronauts from radiation a significant boost for the computing power they'd need on a prolonged mission.

A similar tactic was used in fiberoptic cables by a Japanese lab to transmit just over a petabit per second over 1,800 kilometers, a million times faster than the best internet connection you can buy today. Just imagine what you can do with that much data on demand so quickly and efficiently. Advanced scientific AIs, processing terabytes and terabytes of data collected during the mission, and remote control of drones, probes, and rovers are suddenly in the realm of possibility, maximizing a mission's impact.

If only there wasn't an administration dead set on a war with scientists, backed by an amalgamation of oligarchs who say they dream of exploring the cosmos while actively undermining the progress necessary for that to ever happen, then we could fast track this research and focus on becoming a civilization of explorers and researchers rather than look forward to 12 hour shifts putting tiny screws into iPhones in factories. Sadly, this is not the world in which we live right now...

See: Liu, J., et al, (2025) Possible Spin-Triplet Excitonic Insulator in the Ultraquantum Limit of HfTe5, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 046601, DOI: 10.1103/bj2n-4k2w