I'd propose using our current view of physical reality to own a subset of the UIID + version field if new physics is discovered.

10-20 bits: version/epoch

10-20 bits: cosmic region

40 bits: galaxy ID

40 bits: stellar/planetary address

64 bits: local timestamp

This avoids the potentially pathological long chain of provenance, and also encodes coordinates into it.

Every billion years or so it probably makes sense to re-partion.

  00     04:    Version + Flags
  04     08:    Timestamp (uint64)
  12     16:    Node/Agent Hash
  28     16:    Namespace Hash
  44     32:    Random Entropy
  76     20:    Extra / Extension
  96     32:    Integrity Hash

We will probably end up with something like each planet has its own local addressing, and the big router in the sky does NAT, each solar system has a router and so on.

It is interesting how much of our infrastructure relies on the assumption that 'close enough' is actually 'good enough' for uniqueness. When we move from UUIDs to things like ULIDs or Snowflake IDs, we are really just trading off coordination cost for a slightly higher collision risk that we will likely never hit in several lifetimes. Thinking about it on a 'cosmological' scale makes you realize how much of a luxury local generation is without needing a central authority. It is that tiny bit of entropy that keeps the whole distributed system from grinding to a halt.

> In order to fix this, we might start sending out satellites in every direction

Minor correction: Satellites don't go in every direction; they orbit. Probes or spaceships are more appropriate terms.

Note that they almost immediately contract from 'the universe' to 'the visible universe', which isn't the same thing at all.

I was going to read this, but it starts with an AI slop header image for no purpose, so I intuited that the article was similarly ill constructed.

Another blow to the "all electrons are the same electron" theory. Why have only 1 electron with so many possible ids /s

The best way to solve this is not to, and just giving up on the idea of identification.

If you have an infinite multiverse of infinite universes, and perhaps layers on that, with different physics, etc., you can’t have identity outside of all existence.

In Judaism, one/the name of God is translated as “I am”. I believe this is because God’s existence is all, transcending whatever concepts you have of existence or of IDs. That ID is the only ID.

So, the cosmic solution to IDs is the name of God.