this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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TFW you live in a galaxy-spanning super civilization but your planet is dying because its ID in the central database has a UUID collision with another planet 80000 light years away.
"Works on my machine"
Well, the UUIDs for almost everything we use are galaxy-scale already. Astronomers just need to up those random letters a bit.
How difficult would it be for every single thing that can be cataloged and named in the known universe to have a sufficiently unique UUID?
according to wikipedia, there are about 10⁸⁰ protons in the observable universe
you would need 266 bits to give each one a different number
if you are using base 64, you would need 45 digits
it would look something like this aGVoc3Z4ZnN5YWhkYiByaHNqc2hyIGcgZGhzaGVkaGJz1
IDK, it's fun to think about because maybe the 128 bit UUID is still being used due to 40k-like levels of technical debt, and also weird edge cases that cause ID explosion. Like maybe the 4000 year old spec says we need to track micrometeoroids too, sorry.