When you picture space travel, maybe you imagine sleek starships, glowing consoles, AI copilots, and futuristic screens straight out of Star Trek. Reality check: the universe is run on machines that would lose a race to your kitchen appliances.
The computers guiding our Mars rovers? Barely more powerful than a 1990s desktop. The laptops floating around the International Space Station? They freeze, they glitch, and they’re swapped out like lightbulbs. If you compared their specs to your phone, you’d laugh — and then cry.
It feels absurd. Humanity is a species that can stream cat videos in 4K at breakfast, yet we explore the cosmos with hardware that would struggle to play Minesweeper. Why?
Because the universe is not kind to electronics. Cosmic rays flip bits, solar flares fry circuits, and the vacuum of space does not forgive a crash screen. Modern, fragile chips are like Ferraris with glass wheels — impressive, but useless when the road turns to fire. Space demands something different: reliability, simplicity, and the ability to keep going no matter what the cosmos throws at you.
And that’s the miracle: these “slow” computers have carried us farther than our wildest dreams. They’ve steered probes past Saturn, driven rovers across alien deserts, and kept astronauts alive 400 km above our heads. Humanity’s strength has never been about speed. It’s about persistence. Ingenuity. The refusal to wait for perfection before daring to try.
So yes, the universe runs on computers slower than your microwave. But those humble machines hold something more powerful than gigahertz: the weight of human courage.
