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Things getting cool enough after the big bang seems to be the obvious one.

But on a more serious note, maybe modern encryption? The physical gate being the literal ability to get rocks to count fast enough to finish decrypting something before the heath death of the universe

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I'd actually put modern crypto in the opposite bucket: there's virtually no physical constraints at all. You could do RSA by hand if you had to, and if nobody else has computers, you can pick a key size small enough for doing it manually to be practical.

Oh I agree. I guess I was approaching this from the angle of the use of long keys where it would be literally impossible to decrypt unless computers exist.

We could also get into the sub argument of math being a property of the universe. Does encryption exist if we don't discover it? Trying to imagine a universe where our concept of math is impossible to the universe just not working that way

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