The Library of Babel

in #steemit8 years ago (edited)

The Library of Babel completely blows my mind the fuck out of the water.

It is a digital arrangement of every possible permutation of every letter and every word in the English language. The library is so big, that there are more pages in it, than there are atoms in the universe. No, really.

Just one "authentic" volume, together with all those variants containing only a handful of misprints, would occupy so much space that they would fill the known universe.

The number of different ways in which the books could be arranged in the library is 25^{1,312,000}, the factorial of the number of books, and a number which is so unimaginably huge that when written down it would have roughly 10^{2,000,000}} digits.

In other words, even writing down the full length of this number, without using exponentiation, would take more digits than there are atoms in the observable universe.

Because it has every possible combination of letters and words, it means that every single conversation you have had, or even yet to have, every movie script, every Grammy winning song lyric already exists in the library.

In it, would be a page detailing and describing the exact details of your birth, your funeral, who attended, what they wore and what the weather was like on the day.

The answer to all of lifes questions are in there, even, how to attract a whale on Steemit, ok, that may be a bit of a stretch, but you never know.

I recommend you take a look at the site, read the about section, flip out, and then flip out again when you realise this guy also did the same thing with images. Every single permutation, of every single pixel possibility on a digital canvas. The Mona Lisa exists in it, a perfect portrait of you at 20, at 70 years exists in it.

Image library:
http://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/about.html

Text library
http://libraryofbabel.info/

Happy steeming!

#steemit #steem #philosophy #writing #life

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I can see why it would blow your mind, because it's kind of doing the same thing to me right now as I think about it. I love shit like this thanks man. And since I saw you had a writing tag, I'm going to pull a helpless plug and say my blog is (which super new) completely about writing so it might interest you.

It is quite amazing, isn't it?

Your next novel is in there, somewhere, you just need to know which page it is on ;-)

Upvoted, followed. :)

Keep up the good work!

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