This is an I-Hard podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

When you save that picture of your cute dog or cat on your computer, you expect it to be there later when you want to show it off or send it to your favorite podcaster.

Side note, thanks for all the pet pictures. We love them and keep them coming.

But how can you be sure that the information you store in your computer will be there uncorrupted when you come back for it?

Is our digital information infrastructure robust or fragile?

Since this is a physics podcast, you might be wondering if there are physics reasons that your

data might not be safe. There are. In this case, unfortunately, it's not aliens. I'd love if it were

aliens. But the concern is radiation from space. We know that it can

hurt our bodies and rewrite our DNA, which are essentially biological hard drives. Can it also

corrupt our computers? Cosmic ray bit flips? What does that mean for data centers in space or puppies in space or pictures of

cats on Mars? Oh my! Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary digital universe.

Thank you. Hello, I'm Kelly Waintersmith.

I study parasites and space.

And if something goes wrong with my computer, I have no clue how to deal with it.

Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist, and I'm technically an experimentalist, but really all of my science is on the computer.

Now, you told me that you were thinking about going into computer science before you

decided to go into particle physics.

So are you the person that everyone goes to when they have computer problems?

Or now in the era of, like, MacBooks, is it just like too hard for you to troubleshoot? Or yeah, are you the go-to person?

I'm definitely the tech support person in my family. You know, why won't this thing load or I want to print from here? Why can't I? For some reason, everybody comes to me,

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