Possible and fairly frequent - smaller components are sensitive to smaller energies. It's one of the reasons satellites don't use modern chips - they're too sen

Possible and fairly frequent - smaller components are sensitive to smaller energies. It's one of the reasons satellites don't use modern chips - they're too sensitive, bigger transistors and higher energies survive radiation better. One significant thing that has changed since then though is that in many cases, much of the RAM in use isn't doing something truly critical. Gigabytes are spent holding data, not behavior, so it manifests as a sightly miscolored pixel or a minor calculation difference. The odds of random flips changing something that'll be noticed are much lower. And truly critical stuff often runs multiple machines simultaneously, to detect one of them disagreeing. Which is much better than ECC, as it'll catch all flips anywhere, at the point it becomes relevant. Assuming you're not truly unlucky, and have similar flips on multiple machines.