Ever since I’ve seen the Veritasium video on cosmic particles, I was wondering how much of a threat it would pose to our current computer systems were it to be used as a weapon.
Suppose the power allows to you to shoot streams of cosmic ray from your fingers.
- It can be as intense as you want as long as it’s reasonably harmless to humans.
- You can only direct the rays towards objects within your field of view or whose position you can confidently approximate, so you could target a nearby server behind walls or a plane in the sky, but not a computer on the other side of the world.
- You can use this power for as long as you like with no cooldowns or energy consumption.
- No one can observe the rays, not even yourself
Well, you immediately just broke conservation of energy, so you could indefinitely prolong the heat death of the universe.
Or you could speed it up, get it over with.
how much of a threat it would pose to our current computer systems
A critical threat.
It could change arbitrary data randomly, so the results are undefined and unlimited. Only a super small fraction of data is secured against arbitrary (=unexpected) changes.
Considering that some cosmic ray reach energy in the Joule range, it would definitely be very bad.
On the other hand, people would use you as a particle accelerator for research and that’s damn cool
So you would have a particle accelerator at your finger tips, for it to emit a low enough power for it to not be harmful to humans you want the radioactivity to be on the small scale. Basically a banana, you would be walking around with a banana in your hand. If we remove the requirement of it not been low powered to not harm humans, then we are talking about an instant cascade of particles coming from your finger in a cone, basically it would fuck everything up in its path
