Explained | How cosmic particles affect computer chips

Strange flashes of lights seen by astronauts, pacemaker malfunctions, snags in flight computers, mathematically inexplicable vote counts, and video game glitches. What do they have in common? Seemingly, nothing.

When computers malfunction, it is generally assumed to be a software glitch or an issue with hardware.

While scientists, in the 1970s, became aware that radiation could cause computers to behave in ways they aren’t meant to, chip manufacturers became aware of this vulnerability and started taking extra care when producing microchips and packaging them.

Yet, inexplicable computer errors continued to happen well into the 2000s.

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In May 2003, voters in Belgium went to exercise their franchise, at a time when electronic voting—presumed to be error-free—was being experimented with in the country.

However, during counting, it was found that Maria Vindevoghel, a little-known independent candidate from a municipality in Brussels, got more votes than was mathematically possible.

A recount was initiated using magnetic cards, which stored the original votes, and it was confirmed that Vindevoghel had indeed received extra votes—exactly, 4096 extra votes.

The discrepancy left scientists baffled: software was checked, the computer’s hardware was tested, and nothing was found to be amiss.

Fast-forward to 2008. A Qantas flight travelling from Singapore to Perth dropped 200 metres in 20 seconds mid-flight, followed another sudden drop of 120 metres within minutes. The altitude drops left 119 people on board injured and became a much-discussed incident.

In 2013, a speedrunner playing Mario 64 on console managed to warp up to a platform previously thought impossible. His video, understandably, got the attention of the gaming community, and a $1,000 reward was put up for anyone who could replicate DOTA_Teabag’s warp. It is, to the best of our knowledge, yet to be replicated.

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Three years later, in 2016, Marie Moe was flying to Amsterdam, when her pacemaker malfunctioned. Upon landing in Amsterdam, she was rushed to a hospital where doctors surmised that the tiny computer making the pacemaker work had corrupted data, according to a BBC report.

Suspect was hidden in plain sight

All the aforementioned incidents, and many more unreported ones, have a common, unseen miscreant which scientists are becoming increasingly aware of—cosmic rays.

Although the rays were discovered decades earlier, their impact on our day-to-day lives is something that was not very well understood earlier.

Cosmic rays, found virtually anywhere in the universe—from our sun, dying stars, and supermassive blackholes—break into a chain of subatomic particles when entering the Earth’s atmosphere, like snooker balls colliding and spreading out on the table.

More often than not, these particles cause no disruption to our lives. However, every now and then, one or more of these particles careen into computers causing errors known as single-event upsets, like the one that gave Maria Vindevoghel 4,096 extra votes.

These errors are easier to detect when they occur at high altitudes or above the Earth’s atmosphere, such as in satellites. Closer to the ground, they can be notoriously difficult to single out.

However, if these events are so rare, why bother talking about them?

Smaller they are harder they fall

The reason: technological advancement. As technology gets better and better, our microchips are getting smaller by the day, making them susceptible to interference from cosmic rays. Whereas greater electrical charges would be required to make larger chips malfunction, smaller microchips require less charge to go awry.

In other words, as our chips get better and smaller, they become more and more susceptible to interference from outer space. And like Earth’s weather, space weather too can be erratic, evidenced by the massive geomagnetic storm that was detected in the Earth’s atmosphere in 1859, which, in turn, was triggered by a massive solar flare that sent waves of subatomic particles hurtling towards the Earth.

In 1859, the disruption caused by said storm was limited to issues in electrical wires and telegraph equipment. However, in the not-so-distant future, such storms could potentially knock out power grids and internet cables, the consequences of which could be far-reaching and potentially devastating, given our increasing reliance on computers for pretty much everything.

It can be prevented, but…

Although it is theoretically possible to shield computers from such radiation from outer space, say, by lining them with lead, it would be practically impossible to do on a large scale, given the massive costs involved.

While humans are smart enough to shield critical systems from electromagnetic interference from outer space, our reliance on computers and the ubiquity of subatomic particles from outer space ensure that we are never completely free of this risk and serve as a humbling reminder that we are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, subject to the whims of the cosmos.