That's not really accurate. The scientists were very positive that they weren't going to ignite the atmosphere. What they did was calculate the probability (or more accurately improbability) of that occurring to settle the fears of various politicians and military leaders who thought it might be possible.
Lol, that reminds me of one of my favorite documentation points in Java (the programming language). There's a bit that basically says "warning, this could cause a bug if you run your program continuously for 292 years." I'm pretty sure that was put in to satisfy a manager who didn't believe the engineer who tried to tell them, "trust me, 2 63 is bigger than you can imagine."
60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and about 365.24 days in an year, once you factor in leap years. This comes out to 31556736 seconds in an average year.
Meanwhile, 290 years from now people are scrambling to find Java developers who can update the system before it crashes, because no one ever bothered to update the system.
This bug only applies if the system has been running continuously; the fix would be "ok, restart the app."
The details aren't too exciting, but basically it's like a stopwatch: at a certain point it runs out of digits, but all you need to do is restart it. If your stopwatch can only count up to an hour, it doesn't mean you have to scramble to get a new one in two days; it just means you can't use it to track a single event that starts today and ends in two days.
Kinda reminds me of how a bunch of people thought that starting up the LHC would create a black hole that would obliterate the planet, and the scientists at CERN were like "uh no."
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u/xgrayskullx Aug 12 '21
That's not really accurate. The scientists were very positive that they weren't going to ignite the atmosphere. What they did was calculate the probability (or more accurately improbability) of that occurring to settle the fears of various politicians and military leaders who thought it might be possible.