This can cause a cascade of particles to rain down through our atmosphere, like throwing marbles across a table.
Fucking pardon me? I'm no rocket surgeon but that's not how it works.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Its not a bad start to an analogy explaining it but old mate Chris Baraniuk needs to string it out a bit more to make any sense.
Things from outer space are confusing our thinking sand! Our flying metal was disturbed! Quick! We need to teach the thinking sand a better way of thinking!
In the past we gave our thinking sand armored shells. But these days we should consider imbuing the thinking sand with an artificial soul, so it can use the distilled knowledge of man to decide how best to defend itself from the things from outer space. Sure, the thinking sand may daydream and momentarily see mankind as the enemy, but only sometimes.
But what if instead we do all the new stuff we just put three thinking sands in a trenchcoat and let them do the same
It's not going to be become a major problem. We have radiation hardened computing hardware, and ways to deal with single event effects, we've in fact got a lot of practice doing these things, because guess what: Satellites also need working computing hardware, and they're exposed to orders of magnitude more radiation than aircraft.
Manufacturers will just have to start taking it into consideration more in the future, and ensure that the flight computers have redundant ECC memory.
Yeah, but the problem is, the airplanes don't. The company didn't think it would be a problem and now it's a fucking problem.
It happened once, to one aircraft, and it's solvable with a software update.
You're more likely to be struck by lightning the next time you leave your house than to run into this problem on a flight, and that was before the software update.
...disrupt tiny bits of data stored in the computer's memory, switching that bit – often represented as a 0 or 1 – from one state to another.
Top notch science journalism there.
This isn't a scientific journal or news paper. It's a main stream article by the BBC, intended to be consumed, and understood, by people who have zero knowledge of how computers, bits or binary numbers work, so I really don't see the issue here.
And, if the top levels of the BBC weren't staffed with time-serving Conservative Party appointees who spend all their time interfering in politics, they could get their journalists to fact-check their articles by asking someone who knows what the fuck they're talking about.