What an idiotic argument. Has he never heard of virtual memory? You might want to memory map things that aren't necessarily on a die inside your computer, in fact that's already a very common pattern, with mmap(2) and similar system calls.<p>And the idea can be extended to large computer clusters if not the entire planet, in which case you might be looking at 128 or 256 or a non-power-of-two figure, IPv6 addresses already taking up 128 bits. In which case it would probably also be a good idea to think about variable length pointers to decrease the overhead and address Donald Knuth's complaints in his "Flame About 64 bit Pointers" [1]<p>1. <a href="https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html" rel="nofollow">https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html</a>