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Sirhc978 t1_isxtlc0 wrote

There was a Mario 64 speedrun where a bit flip happened and saved the runner a few seconds.

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Hrspwrz t1_it0dija wrote

Is this because of neutrinos randomly exciting an electron or is my memory off

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gopher65 t1_it12ra2 wrote

High energy charged particles, mostly coming from the sun (solar cosmic rays), or very high energy particles, often the striped cores of iron atoms accelerated to within spitting distance of the speed of light, usually by neutron stars, black holes, or supernovae (galactic cosmic rays).

The highest energy GCR recorded thus far carried the same energy as a fast pitched baseball. Except it was an atomic nuclei. Imagine an atom sized baseball smashing into your ram or worse, your motherboard firmware storage. Stuff will break. Sometimes permanently.

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Hrspwrz t1_it12zdx wrote

Makes you wonder about cases like spontaneous combustion 🤔

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gopher65 t1_it26yzc wrote

That's not a mystery. There is plenty of evidence that those people were smoking cigarettes when they died. They got unlucky and their body's fat caught on fire. Body fat fires are quite hot and fierce, but usually burn themselves out without much damage to the surrounding objects.

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LongStrangeTrips t1_it3imfb wrote

How exactly does your body’s fat catch fire from a cigarette, but yet it doesn’t from direct flame? Also, in what situation would your fat be ever exposed to a flame unless you have a gaping, deep wound?

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gopher65 t1_it3xw11 wrote

People fall asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouth. It falls from their mouth, lands in an extremely unlikely way, and burns through an especially vulnerable spot. Human fat is highly flammable, so it lights on fire.

It's not a hypothesis, it's a confirmed thing that has happened. Thankfully everything has to go wrong before it happens, so it's rare.

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xariant t1_isxyv8v wrote

Bugs in complex software/hardware systems are WAYYYY more likely than cosmic waves being at fault. We even have error correction in our RAM and comms protocols to handle corruption.

The excerpt reads like FUD against voting machines. Right before an election. Yeah, right.

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qichael t1_isy2r93 wrote

a bit flip due to cosmic subatomic particles changing the outcome of an election has actually happened before (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Belgium, Reported Problems section)

not all computers (or voting machines, even) use ECC RAM because it is expensive, so this phenomenon is still something we have to account for.

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milton_radley t1_isy7jk1 wrote

i listened to an hour long podcast about this. it literally caused an election result error.

the winners votes were more than the total voters iirc

they showed an experiment where particles could be seen under the right conditions.

it was figured out and the results fixed. but it happened.

edit: 1 hour, not few hour. found the pod episode

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xariant t1_isy3ewv wrote

It would be really stupid for a voting machine to be designed that doesn't use error correcting technology. It is not THAT much more expensive if at all, these days.

Bugs in hardware and software design are extremely common and are nearly infinitely more likely to cause problems than cosmic particles that evaded hardware error correction schemes.

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LilacYak t1_iszes9j wrote

Just reading the paper ballot twice in the span of a second would be enough, ya? Store the data twice, what are the chances that two bits will flip?

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Franc000 t1_it0c8f4 wrote

Yep, exactly this. Even better, have the system read the ballot 3~5 times, and the confirmed vote is the one that the machine detect as most voted. Completely automated.

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jonathanrdt t1_isyobey wrote

“One likely explanation” is not an actual likelihood; that’s someone saying it’s likely.

Odds are still far greater that it was software error.

Edit: This is the source of the 'likelihood' quote. It says the code in the Belgian election system was so bad there was no point in trying to improve or reuse it. The review of the code process is not at all clear, and these were 486 machines in use in 2003. Cosmic ray is a massive stretch.

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qichael t1_iszfdit wrote

that's true, it totally could have been software. however, researchers spent hours combing through the source code of the voting machines and didn't find anything that could be a possible cause for a bit flip at position 13.

either all of them were wrong, or it was a single event upset, and the most probable cause for a single event upset is, you guessed it, a cosmic ray bit flip.

so no, odds are not far greater.

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stephcurrysmom t1_it14zv3 wrote

Having programmed applications in a real world environment with real world constraints, I agree 100%.

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Sariel007 OP t1_isxjnsq wrote

>When computers go wrong, we tend to assume it's just some software hiccup, a bit of bad programming. But ionising radiation, including rays of protons blasted towards us by the sun, can also be the cause. These incidents, called single-event upsets, are rare and it can be impossible to be sure that cosmic rays were involved in a specific malfunction because they leave no trace behind them.

>And yet they have been singled out as the possible culprits behind numerous extraordinary cases of computer failure. From a vote-counting machine that added thousands of non-existent votes to a candidate's tally, to a commercial airliner that suddenly dropped hundreds of feet mid-flight, injuring dozens of passengers.

>As human society only becomes more dependent on digital technology, it's worth asking how big a risk cosmic rays pose to our way of life. Not least because, with the continuing miniaturisation of microchip technology, the charge required to corrupt data is getting smaller all the time, meaning it is actually getting easier for cosmic rays to have this effect.

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RonPMexico t1_isy3x8x wrote

Because extra terrestrial radiation is capable of disrupting micro chip operations it is a commonly used scapegoat when incomplete information is available.

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the_zelectro t1_isxk8fl wrote

Radiation shielding on critical stuff. Boom, fixed the problem

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wellhiyabuddy t1_isy72gh wrote

That and as chips get smaller it’s easier to add redundancies to insure that the info or inputs are verified by multiple chips before passing along the input

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gopher65 t1_it13dx1 wrote

You need about 10 metres (not a typo) of concrete to have a reasonable chance of shielding against a GCR strike. Lead just makes the strikes worse, so you can't use it. Bulk matters as much as mass for this type of shielding.

I don't know about you, but my phone would be pretty heavy if it had a 30 foot radius sphere of concrete around it to shield it from high energy strikes.

Edit: scratch that. It would be a dome, not a sphere, because the bulk of Earth protects you from the direction of the ground. That makes this shielding much more practical.

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sirnoggin t1_isytpo3 wrote

The universe is interesting in the fact that it is so hostile to artificial/mechanical life compared to biological life.

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the_zelectro t1_isyx3ea wrote

I disagree. Mechanical/technological life is just beginning to evolve on earth, compared to biological life. We've had a 4.7 billion year head start

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sirnoggin t1_iszza5z wrote

The fact is mechanical life evidently cannot evolve on it's own. Hence my argument the universe seems to be geared toward killing it. This article being case and point. Give Bacteria a magnetic field and it'll be fine.

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theRavenAttack t1_iszxt07 wrote

This sounds like an excuse Apple will use as to why their phones slow down and suck after only a couple years.

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fegodev t1_iszlm2m wrote

I've heard those random flashes we sometimes see, when it's dark, are probably charged particles intersecting our optical nerves.

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The_Aviansie t1_it2s2zx wrote

So is this what made my computer murder two graphics cards in a row?

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FuturologyBot t1_isxoeeo wrote

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sariel007:

>When computers go wrong, we tend to assume it's just some software hiccup, a bit of bad programming. But ionising radiation, including rays of protons blasted towards us by the sun, can also be the cause. These incidents, called single-event upsets, are rare and it can be impossible to be sure that cosmic rays were involved in a specific malfunction because they leave no trace behind them.

>And yet they have been singled out as the possible culprits behind numerous extraordinary cases of computer failure. From a vote-counting machine that added thousands of non-existent votes to a candidate's tally, to a commercial airliner that suddenly dropped hundreds of feet mid-flight, injuring dozens of passengers.

>As human society only becomes more dependent on digital technology, it's worth asking how big a risk cosmic rays pose to our way of life. Not least because, with the continuing miniaturisation of microchip technology, the charge required to corrupt data is getting smaller all the time, meaning it is actually getting easier for cosmic rays to have this effect.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y825e3/the_earth_is_subjected_to_a_hail_of_subatomic/isxjnsq/

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africanasshat t1_isxtbo8 wrote

It’s really annoying. I am leaving the computer field because it doesn’t feel like anything is getting better.

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[deleted] t1_isxrste wrote

[removed]

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fish_whisperer t1_isxsl12 wrote

Your comment is completely unrelated to the topic of discussion

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barzbub t1_isxsx6p wrote

Only if you believe that there aren’t influences we don’t understand effecting our planet other than man made.

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ufluidic_throwaway t1_it15str wrote

Funny that these particles have been around for billions of years yet the change in the climate have accelerated rapidly right around the industrial revolution.

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barzbub t1_it18s5x wrote

I guess there wasn’t any warmer periods like when dinosaurs lived or cold times when there were mammoths 🤣

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