Windows fudges it again

[Karlos]

What NASA needs is anything but state-of-the-art. For mission critical projects they will only use parts that are made with a stable process and that has proven their reliability over time. They won't use the latest, greatest multi-core CPU.

I seem to recall they used radiation-hardened PPC running at around 33MHz for many of their recent probes.

[Karlos]

Actually I think it was slower than that.

You're probably right, I think 33MHz was the upper limit even: Info here (PDF document).

-edit-

Holy crap, it's tolerant to over 1M rad (10,000 Gy)...

[Karlos]

What is a more beautiful thought (for me at least), is that once the Earth and human race have been destroyed by our dying sun... one of the few things that will survive is the odd little RCA1802 CPU that has faithfully powered the Voyager spacecraft for over 30years...

It could well be that the two Voyager's will be the only evidence of our ever having existed... It's like a gothic romance in it's beauty

Well, it will survive, but the radiological thermocouple power supplies that keep them functioning will have long decayed past the point where the probe operates. Travelling at the speed they do, any chance meeting with a lump of Oort cloud debris (remote, but there is a huge thickness of it to traverse) would presumably leave only a slowly expanding shell of particles as the evidence of our ever having existed.

[Karlos]

Not quite as beautiful... but tragic none the less.. :-D

The Earth and our race with it (if we don't become properly space-faring by then) will have been killed off by the Sun long before it's epic final expansion. IIRC, within about 2G years, thermal output will have increased enough to heat the Earth to levels uninhabitable to all but the toughest extremophile micro-organisms anyway. Well, at least those that can survive in water vapour droplets, since we're talking about total evaporation of the oceans here.

That's assuming that the gradual changes of the inner planet orbits haven't resulted in a massive collision incident between any of them by then, either.

[Karlos]

Ooooh, this is a cheery thread...

Don't worry, I expect we'll have wiped ourselves out with an all-out global thermonuclear war and concurrent release of doomsday biological / chemical agents long before any of that happens.

In spite of which, life itself will go on. In the glacial, radioactive wasteland that ensue, deinococcus radiodurans will almost certainly live on along with a range of other unusually hardy organisms. After the dirt laden skies eventually clear, photosynthesis will pick up again. At least in those organisms that can withstand the new UV rich daylight. And in the hundreds of millions of years it takes sapient life to develop, you, I and the rest of the complex life that once inhabited the planet should have formed a nice new hydrocarbon resource for them to wipe themselves out over too...

[Karlos]

Look on the bright side though. Microsoft will die with us...

[Karlos]

Yay! Every cloud has a silver lining...

cue Karlos photoshopping an image of the death of Khan with Steve Balmers distended face pasted in...

No time. Will this do?



Btw, photoshop? What do you think I am, a graphic designer or summat? :lol:

[Karlos]

Modern computers never fail!

I wish :lol: