Worse yet, if your probe's OS crashes at the wrong time it could lead to loss of the probe or missing out on a lot of data that would otherwise have been gathered. If a probe's electronic brain crashes due to cosmic rays and goes into a "safe" state it may fail to maintain attitude control, potentially pointing its solar arrays away from the Sun and/or its high gain antenna away from Earth. This can lead to "bad things" such as the probe draining its batteries and dying before controllers have a chance to fix it (this has happened quite frequently in the past, though not always due to cosmic rays). Worse, the probe could reset during a critical course correction manouver, end up failing to go into orbit around a target planet, burning up in a planet's atmosphere, or merely ending up in the wrong location on the wrong trajectory.
Avionics systems use ECC memory and other techniques to avoid being impacted by cosmic rays causing single event upsets. As far as parity and ECC errors on laptops, I don't believe ECC ram is common on laptops.
That being said, this particular article uses a gross overestimate of SEUs for memory, which is really only applicable if your 4GB of RAM fills an entire room in multiple full sized racks (the studies he bases these figures on come from the 80s and the author fails to adjust for physical size when extrapolating to modern memory sizes).
Avionics systems use ECC memory and other techniques to avoid being impacted by cosmic rays causing single event upsets. As far as parity and ECC errors on laptops, I don't believe ECC ram is common on laptops.
That being said, this particular article uses a gross overestimate of SEUs for memory, which is really only applicable if your 4GB of RAM fills an entire room in multiple full sized racks (the studies he bases these figures on come from the 80s and the author fails to adjust for physical size when extrapolating to modern memory sizes).