One interesting thing that this applies to is brute forcing ciphers. Using this you can calculate how many times over oceans _have to_ be boiled before someone can brute force your encryption key.
There's a hilarious stackoverflow post about the work required to brute force aes128/256[0]. One of the answers quotes Applied Cryptography, which Schneier himself quotes here[1]. Summarizing the strength of AES-256, he writes:
> [The amount of energy required has] nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
The concept of "Universal Security" is also discussed by Lenstra et al in https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/635.pdf