Uncle Asks You for Help Recovering Lost Facebook Password

okay so one day your uncle calls you because he has been locked out of his Facebook and doesn’t know the password and needs help signing in. Facebook won’t tell him the password and he can’t use the password reset because he also lost his email password. but he knows you’re a programmer, so he suggests you ‘hack it.’ you tell him that’s impossible for many reasons, such as you can’t get access to the servers because you don’t have the credentials. he responds ‘yeah but aren’t computers really just a bunch of tiny switches called transistors?’ startled, you reply ‘well yeah... how do you know that but can’t figure out Facebook?’ Ignoring your question, he carries on ‘so why don’t we just go to the actual Facebook server and manually move the transistors so that i can log in?’ at which point you narrowly avoid a stroke trying to fathom the difficulty of the proposed task.

you explain to your uncle that these transistors are only nanometers in size, that a processor has trillions of them, all of which are constantly changing in millionths of a second and would have to be changed simultaneously; that the processor architecture is insanely complicated and difficult to learn, not to mention classified information; and that the servers are guarded 24/7 in secret locations all over the world; that the proposed plan would cost billions of dollars and many years to execute, if it is even theoretically possible according to the laws of physics, and that the technology to do such a thing is not even invented and likely far beyond any technological capacity on the planet... he says ‘make it happen.’