NASA: Fill in a name, and you can have an exclusive coordinate in the universe
science.nasa.gov
science.nasa.gov
Maybe that can be reverse-projected back to something like a coordinate (if you know the distance), but it's not the same thing.
just as useless in practical terms
That's not "exclusive". The "pixel" is the exclusive bit.
However, as written it sounds like you are essentially objecting that an address along Central Park (in New York city) is "not exclusive" because there are other "Central Park"s in the USA.
They numbered all the pixels in the CCD of the telescope's sensors. The WFI is a 300.8-megapixel camera. So each pixel in that array is numbered. Wherever the telescope looks, your pixel will sense some light or darkness. That's it. That's the Tweet.
No coordinates involved. In fact, you'll need some math to convert the ordinal numbers of the pixels back into a 2D coordinate on the plane of the sensor array. It's laid out in a unique way. You can see the layout in the official logo.
Referencing how many possible GUID can exist:
The total number of theoretically possible GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers) is 2¹²⁸, which equals exactly 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. This is approximately 3.4 × 10³⁸ (340 undecillion) unique values
a really quick calculation says that if you assigned every cubic area of the universe (ignoring that it's spherical?!) to a single GUID, each GUID would 'own' a cube of space about 680 AU on each side. So there's not really that many GUID.
Would it:
1. Somehow remain static as stars and planets moved through it?
2. Be relative to some coordinate system that we define?
3. Follow some object like an asteroid or planet?
Option (1) is literally impossible. We tend to think of space on Earth as something you can reliably divide up statically, e.g. you can divide the space inside a box up into cubic segments, and that works fine. But in that case, you've defined a coordinate system relative to the box, which is of course moving through space relative to everything else. You eliminate the motion issue by making everything relative to the box.
We can't meaningfully do anything similar for the space between astronomical objects. Everything is moving relative to everything else, and there's no way to "stick a pin" in space. In a very real sense, there is no such thing as a fixed, static volume of space - space is relational, it's what exists between separated objects, it's not an object that can be divided up statically. All the relevant physical theories - special and general relativity, and quantum physics - confirm this.
For option (2), we can try to define a box - a coordinate system relative to Earth, or the Sun, or the Milky Way galaxy, or the Local Group of galaxies, or the Laniekea supercluster, etc. But those are all moving relative to everything else, so any location we identify with coordinates based on that will similarly be moving. One day you might own a piece of space on one side of the Andromeda galaxy, the next day it would be out in intergalactic space (because at those distances, radial coordinates move fast!)
You might think that perhaps we can define coordinates relative to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) rest frame - the reference frame in which the CMB radiation looks uniform and identical in every direction, i.e. not redshifted or blueshifted. In a certain cosmological sense, this is a good candidate for the rest frame of the universe. But the problem is, how do you assign coordinate values to that? You're left with the same basic problem - any point you pick either can't be reliably identified, or is moving along with some chosen object.
Option (3) ends up being the most sensible, for the relational reason I mentioned: we can, in many cases, reliably identify a particular object in space. Now we're back to the "star registry" kinds of scenarios, where you "own" a star. Owning a piece of space can't really work.
We might want to use something like the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), which is designed to avoid rotation with respect to certain distant extragalactic objects.
You'd also need to take the expansion of the universe into account. You'd really need to start using comoving coordinates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_and_proper_distances)
It could make sense to sell spacetime worldtubes instead.
> geological time scale
Things appear to move slowly when viewed from the origin of the coordinate system, but unless you take steps to avoid it, like using comoving coordinates, then at great distances the motion of any given parcel would be enormous relative to local matter, easily exceeding the speed of light.
I’d pay for that. More exciting than owning a pixel.
Imagine the headlines NASA To Sell the Universe.
... poor sap: The sword was amongst the very few possessions found in his rented room when he died, suddenly and peniless.-
And there's definitely cheaper approaches than sending a $2.7b telescope to L2.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
Like a plain old database ?
"NFT without the Blockchain" is a weird thing to say
Though I suppose the only things which I'm aware of which actually benefit from a blockchain was version control systems like git.
(I heard there's some cases where self-executing contractual obligations are a money saver versus proving you're not engaged in unlawful collusion with the counterparty, but as this didn't come from a lawyer I don't even know if that was true).