Visualizing key strength

I came across an interesting YouTube movie the other day. This particular movie shows bullets hitting various things in slow motion. The movie is really a clever advertisement for a high-speed camera that can take 1 million frames per second, but that doesn't make it any less impressive.

Most people probably just think, "Wow, that's pretty cool," when they see bullets in slow motion. When I saw it, however, it made me think of a way to visualize cryptographic key strength.

Suppose that you had an animation of the future of the Earth that shows the continents drifting around its surface. Something like the movies here. You'd have some of slider that lets you pick a multiple of the computing power of the EFF DES Cracker. Once you set that parameter, you'd watch the continents drift around and watch as the number of bits of key that that level of computing power has let you exhaust appears somewhere on the screen. If you picked 1 billion times the power of the DES Cracker, for example, at 116 bits we'd see the continents collide to form one massive supercontinent.

Or you could do a similar thing with the Andromeda galaxy that's currently approaching the Milky Way at something like 120 kilometers per second. As time passes, Andromeda would get bigger and bigger in the sky. At the same level of computing power, you'd see the two galaxies collide when roughly 119 bits of key were exhausted. At about 120 bits, the Sun would become a red giant, destroying the Earth, so the movie might stop at that point. 

Another option would be to go on a tour of the universe at the speed of light and see what sort of things you pass as as you reach various key lengths. The universe is apparently at least 156 billion light-years wide, so you'd be able to see a fair amount of stuff as your key cracking machine does its work.

With the Internet, of course, there's a good chance that someone else has already done that and I just haven't seen it yet.