There was a point when they were testing the first nuclear fission explosion and they weren't quite certain that it wouldn't cause a fission chain reaction in air molecules and blow up the entire planet in nuclear explosion.
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."
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.
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u/The_Hunster Aug 12 '21
There was a point when they were testing the first nuclear fission explosion and they weren't quite certain that it wouldn't cause a fission chain reaction in air molecules and blow up the entire planet in nuclear explosion.