Computer reliability is a concept that has a special connection to Dune: Part One (2021). With danger
around every corner, especially in Arrakis, a society that hadn’t nearly mastered computer reliability would
fall near-immediately.
To draw some parallels between the film and the real world, the carry-all malfunctioning early on in the
film is an excellent start. In this scene, a spice harvester is about to be picked up by a carry-all as a
sandworm is quickly approaching. As the harvester is getting picked up, one of the carry-all’s grips fails
to latch. Had the Duke and crew not been there to save the day, that single malfunction could have lost more
than just the spice it was carrying- the 13 operators onboard would have been eaten as well. Although lesser
in consequence severity, the case of Southwest Airlines’ single router failure has quite a few similarities;
most prominent being the failure causing enormous knock-on effects on the plans of thousands of fliers.
Looking for a more detrimental example, the Patriot Missile System stands out as a case study of what can go
wrong when computer reliability isn’t there. Due to a series of poor design decisions and a lack of
consideration of how the technology would be used in practice, 28 soldiers would lose their lives when the
system failed to take out a Scud missile. Seeing as the slip-suits are arguably the most important piece of
technology in the Arrakis desert, had they not been almost perfectly reliable, the Arrakis people would have
long since gone extinct- even a few imperfections in the missile system allowed for the external forces to
completely bypass the defense. For the Patriot Missile System, the external force was a missile, but for the
Arrakin people, the external force was the planet itself.
A more contrasting example is Ariane 5 and the Thopter sand-storm scene. In the case of Ariane 5, a single
software data-type conversion caused an unhandled error that led to the ship’s self-destruction. This error
was only never handled because the code was ported from Ariane 4, where the error didn’t need to be handled,
so it was assumed that it would be the same with Ariane 5. While the assumption of reliability massively
backfired in the case of Ariane 5, our main character just barely managed to escape catastrophe when he flew
a Thopter into a raging sand-storm with winds as high as hundreds of miles per hour. Had the Thopter not
been so sturdy, and the systems inside not so reliable even in such extreme circumstances, Paul would not
have been able to retract the wings, and there would never have been a Dune: Part Two.