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>You have literally hundreds of systems working in concert and tied to more hundreds of physical components coming under extreme temperature and pressure conditions This is exactly what computers are for: doing hard stuff we can't do on paper or just by real world prototype testing. I imagine this is a hard problem, but it may be so because from a time/budget perspective it may just make financial sense to let stuff blow up now and again, than build out such a system. I kinda see this as the difference between writing typical code versus writing code that's deterministic. The former is cheaper/faster but the latter is safer but more expensive and slower. In growth industries or when you have a strict schedule on your back, the slower approach is often ignored. >Quoth Feynman Feynman died when the hottest CPU was the 386. We simply have the capabilities, at least in hardware, for non-trivial simulation that during Feynman's time would have required CPU resources ridiculous to even speculate about. Safe assumption in Feynman's world (1918-1988), at least in regards to technology and engineering, may not be safe assumptions in our world. The same way our assumptions today won't make too much sense for our grandchildren. They might be bewildered by the idea that rocket fails were constant and common, the same way I'm bewildered by things like hot-days causing vapor lock to shut down old cars or, say, occasionally tuning a carburetor. We have electric gas pumps and computer controlled fuel injectors now. edit: to reply to jacquesm. That's a pretty bold claim about O-rings. We fully understand the materials they're made of, their typical decays, etc. They're not magic. If someone wanted to make a top-down simulation that included, well, everything, it certainly seems possible to me, and while certainly not perfect, if done right, should provide positive outcomes. The real question is, what's the incentive? Spend billions and years doing this for one system (which may be old or even obsolete by the time the simulation is complete) or just accept the occasional preventable loss. Seems the latter approach just makes more sense financially, but that doesn't mean the former approach must be impossible. Many things are possible that just aren't incentivized. |
I'm not even talking about jackquesm's note about the failure mode, either. Just real insidious errors in manufacturing that can't be detected in any sort of reliable, sane way. Even the Challenger's o-ring wasn't guaranteed to fail, and indeed most didn't. In fact, most of that entire o-ring didn't fail.
I've seen some really freaky things amplify what are essentially chaotic edge cases. You can certainly figure them out, but you'd never get anything done for any level of affordability in time for any ship date if you didn't just calculate risk and go ahead.
TL;DR: risk is always there because the world's imperfect. At best you just tighten the statistical confidence, but that's super hard.