Grrl Power #1035 – Keymaster race
Mele Kalikimaka had been stuck in my head for a week. I apologize if I earwormed anyone else.
In reality, anything involving four possible entries would never give you good security options. (Because there’s only four nucleotides found in DNA?) Eight character passwords using only lower case letters can be cracked so quickly today that the time involved is basically negligible, and Deus is talking about something that works out to 64^3 there at the end, which is only 262,144. If each entry can only be G, A, T, or C, then multiply 262,144 by 256, and you get just over 67 million possibilities. A modern computer can rip through that pretty quickly.
However, we’re not talking about straight up computational encryption busting. As Dabbler guessed on the previous page, the superion field only reacts to sapience. Having a print out of every combination doesn’t do you any good, you have to implement it in something with DNA in just the right sequence. Unless you’re a geneticists with just heaps of discards, you’re not going to just stumble across this, especially if you’re just genetically engineering fruit flies or something else without sapience. Even then, human superpowers don’t show up right away. It mostly happens around 8-12 and they take a while to develop.
Edit: As usual, I’ve outsmarted myself and fucked up the math. Deus is proposing a structure that is 64 rings, each comprised of 64 possible entries, each of those entries has 64 levels. Sort of a 4D tumbler, where each “number in the combination” is actually like one of those gym locker locks with 4 rotors, but instead of having 10 numbers, it just has the 4 nucleotides from human DNA. 4 rotors times 4 repeatable entries is 4x4x4x4, right? 4^4 = 256. 64 rings of 64 positions of 64 stacks, or 64^3 = 262,144 possible configurations. Then I just multiplied 256 by 262,144 for ~67 million and change.
BUT, while the above math itself is correct, the “word problem” I used to formulate it isn’t. The problem isn’t 4^4 x 64^3. That would work if we’re talking about turning a dial on a safe where there’s only one right answer per dial. The way I framed it in the comic, ALL 64 entries of 256 possible combinations on ALL of the 64 stacks of 64 disks have to be correct. I can’t even figure out the formula for that, but there’s been more than one suggestion that it’s 4^(64^3). According to the Windows calculator, the result of that figure is “FUCK OFF.” It’s probably one of those “more than the number of atoms in the universe” numbers.
So when Dabbler says “a pretty solid encryption key,” it might be an understatement. Honestly I might have to revise Deus’s figures just a bit, cause that seems a little extreme.
This is all assuming he’s telling the truth, though. :D
I keep forgetting to promote this: The kickstarter for Tamer 8 is up! It has already comfortably made its goal, I think it did that in the first few hours, but I’m letting you know so you can get the book and extra goodies if’n you want as soon as everything is available.
New incentive is up! Dabbler decided to get out of the pool, in slow motion (see the bonus comic at Patreon), possibly with added “physics.”
Cue Mele Kalikimaka.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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So, some Nth race added an encrypted field to the universe that gave beings with the key access to incredible power, implanting the key into their DNA. Then spent too much time doing sex tourism on earth?
Explains some mythology, then you get the occasional human with enough of it to get at least partial access.
Actually I think this means maybe the nth are from (turn echo effects on…) SOMEWHERE ELSE (close echo effects) and set up this nice little universe with a bunch of physics deliberately designed for them to toy with.
hmmm, yes, a toy box universe for young Nth level beings to practice on and play in…
truly a nightmare scenario, especially for any would be galactic power hungry civilizations.
and giving into temptation I recently wrote a short story about something just like that.
Beyond the Edge of Everything
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Beyond-the-edge-of-everything-is-playtime-911228546
So yeah, that implies that whoever or whatever created the universe they live in left in a Dev Mode, or a Cheat Code, or whatever you want to call it. Innnnteresting.
The Nth might’ve left few tools around… Halo those orbs you have might be the dev tools…we’re going to need them miss….
DNA is for all intents and purposes the machine code for one of the most complex Bio-chemical Machines/Computers in existence. if you compare a simple Binary Computer to DNA
Binary Computer [0,1] Base 2
8 Bit Bytes, 256 character alphabet
4 bit Byte, 16 character Alphabet
256^64 = 1.341 x 10^154
[1.341 x 10^154]x64 = 8.581 × 10^155
[8.581 × 10^155]x64 = 5.492 × 10^157
5.492 × 10^157
Quaternary Computer
DNA [0, 1, 2, 3] [A, T, G, C] Base 4
6 bit byte DNA, 4096 Character possible Alphabet, 2048 Character Paired Alphabet
3 Bit Byte RNA, 64 Character possible Alphabet, 32 Character Paired Alphabet
2048^64 = 8.41 x 10^211
[8.41 x 10^211]x64 = 5.3863791 × 10^213
[5.3863791 × 10^213]x64 = 3.4473 × 10^215
3.4473 × 10^215
Pretty sure a binary computer couldn’t crack an encryption utilizing DNA as a Key
and if you used Base 6 DNA it would be even more secure
A binary computer could do it just fine – it’d just take more bits, but it’s exactly as complex – complexity isn’t added by having a different base. You can model DNA exactly by just using two bits per bit (eg. G = 00, T = 01, A = 10, C = 11).
And this was already done, which is why the mapping of the human genome shrank from a planned hundred year marathon to about ten years. HFY?
yeah we humans are pretty bad at predictiing our future capabilities, there used to be people who believed that airplanes would take millions of years to develop
why did my post not load?
why is my post not loading?
These last few pages it has taken anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour to show up.
There seems to be a Trinity Knot somewhere in the caching. Either that or a small-mesh fishing net covering the I/O ports.
@DaveB, the last thing on Earth I want to be talking about is the comments system. But with the current delays, it is almost impossible to carry on a decent conversation on the highly interesting topics arising from your well-thought entertainment. And it is probable that some otherwise nice folks are not bothering any more due to the delays in presentation.
I am not qualified to do any more than look at the publically available technology profile and make educated guesses at potential trouble-spots — my experience is at a much higher level. But we do have people here with good experience at this lower level, and you can reach out to them.
That was fast! I barely had time to sip my caffeine!
Like his tie knot.
Yeah, it’s been mentioned before. It’s the trinity knot (https://www.ties.com/how-to-tie-a-tie/trinity) and it seems that Dave is having Deus always wear his ties like that. In any appearance while wearing a tie, it’s this knot.
I think he’s sported the equally classy Eldredge knot a couple times as well.
Ow…
I wonder how this whole dna thing fits with maxima’s backstory, did the rock just replace a previously hidden power or something?
It might not, we have magic and psychics and supernatural beings separate from supers. So some other alien tech, maybe same source (species or individual made them) but not power source, unless that is how the symbiote works, the symbiosis is a gene unlock and amplifier.
And what if Maxima’s DNA was the key to open the “lock of that rock”
Isotopic differences/abundances mean even identical protein sequences can have subtly different neutron totals, hell, if methylation occurs the neutron total will have changes. Does that screw anything over?
While this is all very interesting, I promise you it ISN’T what mathematician’s dream about!
See this would make me fall for dabbler not the sexy clothes but the brains
Using a calculator I found that 4^(64^3) is a number so big that it slowed my word processor when I pasted it in. 55 whole pages of numbers, it is 2.596*10^157,827. For everyone’s convenience I won’t show it here, but https://defuse.ca/big-number-calculator.htm this calculator can handle it.
Yeah that’s 157,828 DIGITS. If you counted every elementary particle in the universe every second since the beginning of time, Whole universes would flare into existence and experience heat death before you even COUNTED that high. And that’s assuming that got the proper order in the encryption on the first try.
(Actual cryptographer here)
Passing the number of atoms in the universe really isn’t that tough. We estimate there are about 6*10^79 atoms in the universe and the RSA key used to identify this website has approximately 6*10^610 possibilities. (It is actually much easier to guess than that and the most secure part of the connection only has 1*10^77 possibilities.)
But let’s try to estimate how many possibilities there are for this key. For that, the most important question is “how many codons are there” where each codon has 4 possibilities (or represents 2 bits of information). From the description there are “64 rings of 64 rings of 64 [codons]”. This is strictly multiplying.
* The inner-most ring is just 64 codons
* The next layer is 64 rings of that, so 64*64
* The outer-layer is 64 rings of that, so 64*64*64=262,144
* So with 3 rings of the same size, you get 3*N (where N is the number of elements of the inner-most ring)
(If you want to check this logic, do it with rings of 3 and you’ll see you get 27 codons or rings of 2 and get 8 codons.)
So, now we can figure out exactly how many keys there are. If a codon has 4 possibilities, then 2 codons has 4*4, 3 has 4*4*4, and more generally N codons has 4^N. So, there are 4^262,144 (or 2^524,288; or 2.6*10^157826) keys. This really is a ridiculous number of keys.
(This is assuming I understand the description possibly)
Finally, for sake of comparison, we do not believe that there is enough energy in the universe to brute-force a key with 10^77 possibilities.
This leaves three possibilities:
1. The key is easier to crack than brute-force (like RSA keys) so needs to be bigger
2. The aliens are just showing off (and probably had a junior engineer design the system who had something to prove)
3. OMG Sci-Fi big numbers and aliens may have more energy/etc. than we imagine! (Most likely)
We don’t expect that it was brute-forced. I think the premise is that evolution eventually found it, but the encryption was badly designed and partial breaks were available, meaning hill climbing was possible.
After all, how many possible keys are there for a monoalphabetic substitution cipher? permutations(26) is about 2^88 bit number, but that doesn’t mean the monoalphabetic substitution cipher is 88 bits strong. Partial solutions yield increasingly useful results so the solution is very easy.
> We don’t expect that it was brute-forced….
This is exactly what I’m capturing with possibility 1. Many algorithms (such as the monoalphabetic cipher) have techniques which are much easier that brute force. Sometimes it is because you can break the solution into pieces and have hill-climbing. Sometimes because there are just more efficient search algorithms which allow you to eliminate large swaths of candidate keys, sometimes because there are just more efficient search algorithms (such as a binary search over sorted data versus just trying them in order).
So, if we grant that the aliens did option 1, we can make two conclusions:
A. This is asymmetric cryptography. Everything we’ve seen so far suggests that with symmetric cryptography (where the encryption and decryption keys are the same) there should not be any attacks significantly better than brute-force on the key. Thus, it must be asymmetric (where the encryption and decryption keys are different)
B. The aliens have some terrifyingly strong computers (including quantum computers) to throw at these hard mathematical problems so they need to scale the problems massively large to avoid attack.
This is entirely reasonable.
(I also recognize the ridiculousness of applying real-world cryptographic principals to a few sentences thrown out in a comic like this. But us cryptographers need our fun too! For that matter, Dave, if you ever have questions about cryptography to ensure things in your writing make sense, feel free to ping me!)
I think we are operating under the assumption that the ones that made the decruption key are the same ones that made this neo-quantum field *not a given, but if one was aware of it and made a decryption key and used the human genome as a medium and they weren’t the creators of the field it would be a weird way to go about unlocking it*, Nth trying to unlock the tech of Nth+1 (why I hate the leap from tier 3 to 4 in the Kardashev scale, WAY to big a leap, so on a more complex scale a 4 trying to unlock the tech made by a 6.
-but that aside lets assume for now the ones that made the decryption key also are the ones that made the neo-quantum field.
In fact if we look at all three of the neo-quantum fields in this series they all have a very artificial feel to them, as they aren’t just (space/time and the particles within and the *codex of creation* and so on that makes up the physical laws and dimensions and so on that we associate with the”regular” quantum field.
these three all have different ways to access and different levels of being hidden, almost like tests, mile markers, or different networks.
the psionic later is the easiest, not detectable through conventional means but has its own particles and effects influenced by thought, so the right brain chemistry and a facsimile of that and you manipulate and detect this layer. So detectable with commonly available antennas and with the right build open access, like a ham radio.
the thaumian (magic) field is like a wifi network, you don’t pick it up with basic equipment, but it gives off a radiation that can be picked up on, just need the right passwords to access the features.
this superion field is also like a wifi network, or possibly as yet made quantum computer network. Can’t be detected through any normal means; the makers want it hidden and only accessed with the right passwords and “receivers” (or connected units, not sure what terminology they plan to use for networked devices on a quantum based system).
in short the other two can be picked up and with trial and error figured out and worked with, this one looks to be hidden intentionally with only a specific way to detect it even exists (and only by accessing it).
I wonder if having this key be intentionally weak (such that it can be cracked in pieces) is a feature rather than a bug.
As far as we can tell there isn’t enough energy in the universe to brute-force a key with far fewer possibilities (<10^77), so why have this key this long? I realize that I missed three more reasons (which are not contradictory).
4. The key must tolerate errors/changes. Since everyone's DNA is different, it's possible that everyone's "decryption key" is also a little different. So, how can we make sure it still works? By building in redundancy and error correction. (This doesn't mean all work equally well, just that there isn't a single one which works.)
5. Different keys must be able to decrypt different things. (This key won't give access to everything, but just some subset of the field and it may be different for different people. A complicated key could permit fine-grained permissions to different aspects of the field based on the properties of the key.)
6. The key intentionally allows itself to be cracked one (possibly very large) piece at a time. The creators of it want people to have a chance at cracking it. So, there is a path which is much easier than brute force (and possibly less work than our current best encryption) but figuring that path out is extremely difficult and requires interesting new areas of math/science/etc.
I totally agree. To be honest, I think it’s a mixture of the 3. WTS I can safely say 1 and 2 are highly likely.
Firstly, it’s much easier to crack than that. For this key to work the key has to not only access the “Superion Field” (sic), but also make sapient life. That means the genetic code has to make protein structures capable enough to support life. This means that the key isn’t completely random.
Secondly, we’re talking about some species that was able to shape the fundamental forces of this universe and encrypt part of said forces. That requires a civilization so advanced it would be in the mythical type VI on the kardashev scale. So harnessing the power of a universe wouldn’t be that difficult as they don’t just shape the universe but build them from scratch. One could safely say that if they needed to prevent others in said civilization from messing with said field, then a harder encryption than 10^77 could be needed. If it was to prevent civilizations inside said universe from brute force cracking, then yes 10^77 is likely sufficient. That is until they advance to a type IV or higher.
Now there is a scary thought, were the creators of this neo-quantum field trying to just prevent/limit access to if for the subjects within the sandbox, or was there some intent to prevent others of their own kind from accessing this world.
on that later if the RPG theory is correct this becomes a non-issue for players if they are suppressing their memories and extra-universe properties to play; but a hacker might be able to interrupt and introduce unwanted elements.
in a jokey setting it could end up a Nth kid’s early project, or secure enough to just prevent the more wild youths from buggering it all up while their society expects better from their fully grown peers (one aspect of trying to imagine such beings is the fallacies in trying to imagine how they think, but for the sake of fiction we can just project and exaggerate.
although there could be levels of this depending on how many and how big their range of influence is of above 3 civilizations/entities exist. So long as we don’t shrink the universe or ignore physical laws *like 90% of media that does cosmic stuff *rule of cool* unfortunately can make the universe seem a lot more fragile and smaller than it really is, and honestly at times feels a tad disrespectful towards the sheer scale of it, hence rolling my eyes at Screw Attack’s Death Battles where they try to mathematically calculate the power of characters that obey rule of cool and aren’t even internally consistent with this power (and whose own creators have stated physics wasn’t the focus, just how cool it looks). I think a good point if you want more solid sci-fi is not to have anything in the universe that is part of the universe containing more energy than the universe.
but on the levels, we assume the Xevoarchy is made of a lot of tier 1 and more than a few tier 2 civilizations (regardless of which civilization scales you use, tier 2 tends to be where you see galactic empires/federations, dyson spheres, stasis devices, molecular and atomic rearrangement devices, hard light, and so on.
we know ascended class exists in this setting, from what was said they seem to be anywhere from Vorlons to Star Gate Ancients. Which again, even ascended can have this huge range on physical abilities and tech, but this setting at least has said even their tech when found seems to obey the laws of physics, just able to do things much more efficiently and with bigger effect than the tiers below them.
but go above that into the *we might as well call ourselves primordial cosmic gods because for all intents and purposes in your universe that is what we are*…although I like to play with the idea that such species do have young and mature and different sub-cultures but being so insanely complex you could encounter the same species five times and think you met five different species ranging from magic user, gods, demons to hyper advanced aliens and cosmic beings depending on the culture and eeven individual.
which is the crux of that, if we have this insanely advanced species with more than one culture, there could be attempts to divide up the universe (or even make claims on different dimensions and timelines of the multiverse) and even create different quantum fields for their own use. Rival programs…or their version of building houses and neighborhoods for them and their families.
all of that is just spitballing of course.
Well… We know that the “Elder Gods” do sorta exist in this setting. It was explained earlier that there were some beings that were Thaumically messing with the demons and devils through their vices by giving them power and using that to control/feed on them. Some could and would say those are interdimensional creatures. Ones that could be categorized to have come from a class IV civ. After all they are known to have knowledge that goes beyond the known universe, even if knowing it will drive you maddingly insane.
One would likely need/want to encrypt something that could break the universe to prevent it from being accessed by said creatures. Otherwise, someone/something like The King In Yellow would just destroy it all just for funzies.
Also, since 1036 came in with clarification, It would seem my estimation was a bit over zealous. At a bear minimum we’re talking about a type IV, as the “Superion Field” hasn’t been there from the conception of the universe. Still potentially in the “Cosmic Gods” category though.
I’m thinking “What if the encryption is just like net-nanny for supers”? Once you’ve developed enough to decipher the algorithm, you can then access sandbox mode. Kind of like child-proofing it.
It occurs to me Sciona may have figured this out, or found a back door method, as she was able to use blood assumed from supers or supernatural to give herself powers with blood magic.
Back door. She was using the genetic material (blood of supers) to boost herself via magic. The Thaumic field here was the driver, and the genetic material was the back door.
yeah, looking over the pages I am inclined to agree. She may not know how the powers work but she knows how to manipulate the medium that holds the already open decryption keys *even without knowing that*.
This revelation about DNA and the different energy fields is so great that no one notices that panel two is a rehash from two pages ago! Not even Dabbler, who is REALLY good at noticing 4th-wall things!
Weirdly, it’s not. The light source is in a different position (roughly centered as opposed to on the right) and the orbs have rotated.
What I’m really curious about is how a genetic code would check for the presence of sapience.
We’re not ourselves sure how to check if a computer is sapient ,we only have close approximations that lets us take a good crack at it. Does a supers DNA interview the host to figure out if it’s sapient and then wipe the host’s memory? Wouldn’t this special DNA need to be sapient itself to check for sapience, or is it just checking for a basic stand-in for sapience like if the owner knows what the fibonacci sequence is and if you injected it into a computer with the stand-in somewhere on its hard drive had some superhuman genetic material entered that DNA might decide the computer qualifies as sapient?
It seems like a very difficult criteria to test for without something as explicit as an interview conducted with another sapient being, and it’s not necessarily the case that you could just check for complexity of brain tissue or if the DNA is capable of making a brain that could be sapient because that DNA fucks up now and then and makes a barely-sapient or barely-not-braindead human.
or the species (or individual there of) capable or artificially producing and inlaying a quantum field used something insane like a dimensional imprint signature sequence of proteins commonly associated with sapient production, or a psionic layer feed back element as an additional trigger corresponding with said proteins (the fill in the blanks yadda yadda parts of what Deus is saying possibly).
considering they are so insanely advanced. Not like it has to make sense to an ephemeral linear being that exists within and is comprised of the quantum field they may exist outside of and completely separate from and this obey foreign properties with said insights and perceptions to connect dots you not only don’t see but would never guess existed.
which is kind of the idea here, Dabbler is being dumb founded in part because this is a supposed quantum field within the other fields that not only did none of their advanced sciences detect, but never even got a hint it existed, hidden behind a specialized decryption key to access that has been shoved inside the genome of some random humanoids.
Don’t forget you mentioned plotting the number of neutrons in the proteins. That implies the correct combination of isotopes in each protein. Proteins built out of multiple amino acids from said DNA. This is so much more complex.
these slight variations could be the reason for different kinds of powers, no one actually has the full access code, just close enough to get some of the perks, and possibly mostly through subconscious access.
Nice.
So we are a satellite signal with 4000 channels but 3600 of them are scrambled and they have all the good content.
We are probably supposed to buy a subscription to unscramble but if you know a guy or you are that guy, you can get the channels unscrambled.
Rainbow table custom decoder chips for everyone!
There is a question on the range of this specialized quantum field, others have stated Earth, but it seems given this level of complexity it seems most likely it is more complex and wider range than say the artificial mana fields of ArYonelico or the Mana series (in which magic is possible on their world or continent thanks to a centralized location producing the mana field and reality altering code work, but very short range and can be turned off). some series *again magic* like Fairy Tail or Slayers if they go to another world they lose their magic as the sources for their magic don’t exist there *arguably Lina should still be able to use chaos magic unless she leaves her entire multiverse; just not the local astral plane and demon lords sourced stuff*.
So is this special quantum field universal, or only in a certain region of space, the whole galaxy, even if just in the local galactic cluster it would be big enough that unless you are super pan galactic civilization you probably won’t be able to notice and regard it as a universal fixture.
It’s not 4 bits, it’s qbits ;)
OK, Terran Helix DNA is Te Right Shape to Hold These Code Strings
And Humans have long enough Stands to Hold Whole Keys
So do some Non-Sentient Species
But it takes Sentient Awareness to Activate the Key,
By Collapsing the Quantum State
Discussing just Humans for the Moment
Every Human is Born With a Decryption Key
Each Key Unlocks a Different Action,
Only Some of those Manifest Detectably as Supers,
There might be a Super Out there Immune to Antimatter,
How Would they Ever Find out?
The is an Enable State Set By Location Of Generation (Conception)
There is an Enable State of Q-State Collapse
And There May Be More Enable Points….
Varia Mirrors others Keys Thus the result is related but different
Maintaining Her Own Enable States
So She Gets Results for Keys that Are not Active in the Source…
You aren’t going to find the master decryption key,
In this Key Sequence
4*(64^3) is
*exactly* 2^524288. But a 525288-bit number is also a 65536-byte number.
So this is a number that takes exactly sixty-four kibibytes of memory to store.
and
*approximately* 2.56370567831E+157826 base ten, but who cares about base ten??
So you need half a megabit to store this number.
Yeah, no one is buying that bullshit (not even for one dollar!) that SmugD ‘just happened’ to stumble on this in his spare time
Well Valle might be an eldritch and Sciona was able to use super powers using blood magic, which may be something Alari study on the norm and not unique to her.
and while eldritch vary from series to series when something this high up is involved from being something they programmed (cleaning program, randomizers, etc…), reproduced while in the universe and thus are the ancestors of the eldritch, eldritch are a computer virus/glitch in the cosmic matrix, evolved naturally on the outskirts or are playing catch up (the frogs to the Nth tier beings’ super god humans…or something closer like monkeys to humans depending on how scary over the top you want your Nth level beings to be. Personally I wrote Cthulhu class beings to be treated as cute little froggies by cosmic born Amana children…but still have wiggle room..for those not at that power class.
any who, Vale may be an eldritch in some form., this may give her some astral multiplaner insight to be more aware this field even existed even she can’t access it. The Alari may be able to use biomancy *magic assisted genetics* to pull a super skrull with super DNA, figure out why that works, and do some cross referencing and you may get the ground work poking at the incomprehensible construct with a stick and see if you hit any buttons.
Star Trek second in command explanation after the techno babble.
-like a monkey driving a car, it doesn’t understand how a car works, why it works, or any clue how to make one, it just has to figure out which controls do what, so to speak.
How did you decode this, Deus?
Deus: I found a friend with a really big quantum computer. It tested all of the possible decryptions…at the same time. And the friend pointed out that the inactive dna is in plain text, and is the operating manual.
Geoff Castellucci’s version of Mele Kalikimaka is one of my favorite covers of the song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT894S_zoD0
“So when Dabbler says “a pretty solid encryption key,” it might be an understatement. Honestly I might have to revise Deus’s figures just a bit, cause that seems a little extreme.”
For something that has eluded a galaxy’s worth of non-Nth generation tech civilisations, I think it is pitched just about right. Unless Deus only solved it using present day human technology.
However Deus is not limited to that, having access to supers & alien widgets. All it would take is a super precog looking some distance into the future & finding out what every galactic school child knows about the missing fundamental field and what it turned out to be.
Is it bad I can hear the sound effect of Dabbler’s eyes contracting and one of her ears twitching?
So, the value of FUCK OFF is apparently somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.59637056783100077612659649572688282774473437634845604635… × 10^157826 and the last few digits would be …6185773056
(Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!)
Isn’t Wolfram Alpha great?
I’d probably just put this down to 2.6 × 10^157826 or, since there are between 10^78 and 10^82 atoms in the known universe, we can just lowball that as 10^157744 times more combinations than there are atoms in the known universe.
That is 10 with over a hundred and fifty thousand zeros after it. It is mind-bogglingly complex. Sounds about right for Nth level encryption.
“The way I framed it in the comic, ALL 64 entries of 256 possible combinations on ALL of the 64 stacks of 64 disks have to be correct.”
Not … necessarily. Some of them have to be ‘correct’, inasmuch as they directly grant superpowers; the rest are correct (though the first part are ‘correct’ as well in this manner) only in that they combine with Varia’s ‘universal key’ to produce a different/unusual capability in her. You really want to crack this thing and know what powers you’re getting? Varia’s your key.
I’m really curious about how gestalt powers even work, given this information – even in humanity, the number of people who hit the right variables to activate a super-sequence is really small. How does a gestalt power – Varia’s or any other form – “re-interpret” a non-super-sequence into a super-sequence to utilize the power? it can’t be “completing” their own in some fashion – they have a superpower already, so the genes are already hitting the required combination to “work.” I just dunno. Maybe its the same way Deus is modding normal humans to give them super powers. Come on Deus, fail that will roll and spill it!
I initially thought that was a different song and so the one stuck in my head now is this: https://youtu.be/_rq-OfiCqHo
Darn those mice never let your planet sized computer code run free ……
the talk of Nth beings creating quantum fields reminds me of an old writing prompt, that ultimately became the basis for my own “mothers of the multiverses”, Amarians, Amana, and so forth.
A fanfic writing prompt of creating a setting where ALL the fictional universes and even self contained multiverses existed, and the omnipotent beings were part of their own species in some omniverse creating their own multiverses and presenting themselves different inside them per their own personal preferences and aesthetics, even creating entire pantheons.
so an extra universal space with
Mana Yood,
Azathoth,
the lord of nightmares,
the chousin/Tenchi-sama,
the presence,
the one above all,
and all others like this.
-adapting this theme from mythological to sci-fi and later shifting it up when realizing the actual scale of the universe and how multiverses could work rather than just rule of cool, or keeping it simple.
So according to https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/algebra/large-exponent-calculator.php the value of 4^262144 is approximately 2.60E157826. If I were to change that number to moles (6.02E23) then it would be 4.32E157803 moles. To answer your question about the number of molecules in the universe: the sheer number of H and He drastically outweighs all other elements to the point that taking the average molecular weight of the universe is 1.3074 grams per mole. The estimated mass of the universe is 4E57 grams.
If the universe were to have 4.32E157803 moles then the mass of the universe would be 5.65E157804 grams.
So we would need 1.41E157747 universes to have 4^262144 molecules.
Sooooooo…. Does this mean that the Simulation Theory of the Universe is correct? (in the GP universe)
Maybe yes, maybe no. There are also hybrid versions where there is a raw universe but something advance and/or powerful enough comes along that can manipulate physics so changes and adds things to the universe that the newer inhabitants can’t differentiate from the natural state of the universe
Soooo…God is a programmer.
Computer tech wouldn’t be possible if He wasn’t.
Ah My Goddess, flash backs.
Which really should have been brought up sooner.
the universe is basically a program God created and he is helped out by other higher dimensional beings who work in the computer room overseeing various aspects of the universe (Yggdrasil). When they enter the universe they have to suppress most of their power to prevent them from causing any damage to the local dimensions and fabric of reality.
I think there’s a level of complexity people are missing: “series of epicycloids using the number of neutrons in each protein as the radius” So we aren’t dealing with codons, we’re dealing with proteins, which can be represented as a series of codons, typically around 200, but ranging up to 27000.
c200 amino acids per typical protein
c19 atoms per amino acid
20-22 standard amino acids used in protein construction. (64 codons coding for 20 amino acids, start, stop, and a couple of specials that aren’t coded directly)
(But 500 known to occur in nature)
Each amino acid is an amino group (NH3+, 7 neutrons), a carboxylate (CO2-, 6+8 neutrons) and a unique side-chain.
Potential atoms in amino acid side chains: C, H, O, N, S and Se.
Between 0 (H)* and 45 (Se) neutrons per atom.
* Though could be 1 or 2 if you count isotopes
** Though could be 31-60 (only 40-46 stable)
Simplest side chain = -H, total neutrons 0.
Potential neutrons per amino acid : 21 to 76 (tryptophan)
Potential neutrons per protein : (21 to 76) ^ (200 to 27000)
That’s giving a lot of potential range for the number of neutrons in a protein.
Using molecular mass as a rough analogue for number of neutrons, heaviest known protein is Titin at 806 kiloDaltons, lightest is hepatocyte growth factor activator at 3.95kDaltons.
Is it 64^3 sets of codons?
Or 64^3 x 4^27000?
Or 64^3 x 4^27000^(range of neutron counts)
You know when you break Dabbler you are onto some serious stuff.