How would floating point numbers be affecting space and time travel in future?

Each technology, that is evolving, begins with simple piece of programming code that starts with variables of certain data types. It is interesting to note that many calculative and computing technologies including system clocks have "float" (and similar other) data types which can store floating point numbers. There are many evidences already which depicts how human errors in judgement and prediction have created floating point errors and ended up in a chaotic disaster.

Just to illustrate a few of them to support my question:

February 25,1991: 28 American soldiers killed due to floating point error!!

The time in tenths of second as measured by the system's internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to produce the time in seconds. This calculation was performed using a 24 bit fixed point register. In particular, the value 1/10, which has a non-terminating binary expansion, was chopped at 24 bits after the radix point. The small chopping error, when multiplied by the large number giving the time in tenths of a second, lead to a significant error. (Source)

June 4, 1996: Blast in an unmanned spaceship during launch

The rocket was on its first voyage, after a decade of development costing dollar 7 billion. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. Specifically a 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,768, the largest integer storeable in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed. (Source)

There are lots of examples out there where, 10th or even 100th floating point multiplied small chain of errors to huge disasters.

While in future, when space and time travel is considered a definite possibility, How should such unpredictable errors be handled? How would programming and development of such long travels be done specifically with floating point values?

Bonus: how would the cause of any such failure would be recognized or investigated if it occurred during space and time travel?

Edit: Don't Consider Unpredictable literally. It was just a hyperbole annotation used. I simply just meant "Hard to predict"

posted almost 8 years ago

Karan Desai‭

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