How much damage could you do with the power to shoot cosmic rays? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

top 5 comments

sorted by: hot top new old

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Well, you immediately just broke conservation of energy, so you could indefinitely prolong the heat death of the universe.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Or you could speed it up, get it over with.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

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

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

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

this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025

8 points (90.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

33845 readers

1835 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]