Meet the library of babel. Its purpose is to contain every single thing ever written. While it hasn't reached its completion by having every possible combination of characters out to 1,312,000, it does have every single combination of lower case letters, spaces, commas, and periods, out to 3200.
Go ahead, search it for one of your facebook posts (stripping unavailable characters of course). Look up a diary entry you made when you were six. Find your most private thoughts you've told nobody. Hell, it will probably even contain this thread (well, parts).
What does this library look like? Well, the project takes inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges's own Library of Babel
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries…The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides…each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters
In this version, each "book" is 3200 characters long. Each shelf has 32 books. Each wall has five shelves. Each room has four walls of shelves. Each room has 640 different combinations of 3200 characters.
So then how many rooms are there?
Well, then we need to know how many combinations of 3200 characters there are. Our pool is 29 (26 letters + 1 space + 1 comma + 1 period) The number of different combinations can then be represented as 29^3200
But let's just call that 4.7162*10^4680, mmk? But now that we have the number of possible combinations of 3200 characters, we can divide that by 640 to see how many rooms are in the library!
7.3690*10^4678 rooms. For reference, the larger estimates for the number of fundamental particles in the universe are around 10^85.
That's one big library.
inb4 my calculations are wrong
It does contain this thread (up to the line this thread (with bbcode kept intact and then unavailable characters stripped - the search does it automagically): libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?howdy
I could try to put some of that into more perspective by figuring out how much area all those rooms take up, or how tall a tower of rooms would be, but honestly at this scale I feel like it'll be so large it wouldn't matter. Suffice it to say: shit's big
Things just get silly when you look at the maths of combinations and permutations. Saw a Numberphile video once discussing the randomness of card decks, and how many possible orders there are of a pack of 52 cards. There was also one about how many different games of chess are possible. The numbers are just too big to comprehend. Every pack of cards you pick up, every game of chess you play, has an extremely high likelihood of never having been played before. Cool, huh?
I could try to put some of that into more perspective by figuring out how much area all those rooms take up, or how tall a tower of rooms would be, but honestly at this scale I feel like it'll be so large it wouldn't matter. Suffice it to say: shit's big
If that 29^3200*410 is the number of books, then using the dimensions of Tolkein's Two Towers (word count of 156,198 * 5 -> rough character estimate of 780,990 characters -> /3200 to receive 244 'books' to the Two Towers) of 6.3375e-4 m^3. Dividing this by 244 to receive 2.597e-6 m^3 per book. Therefore 29^3200*410*2.597e-6 = 9.418e4680 m^3. The volume of the Earth is roughly 1.098e21 m^3. So that makes 8.577e4659 Earths to hold the books if the Earth was an empty sphere and every bit of space inside was used to store the books.
So I suppose that, in the future, authors won't be people who write but rather people who pour through page after page of random gibberish in order to find the perfect book.
Because that is the real crazy thing about this. It doesn't just contain everything that has been written, it also contains everything that will eventually be written in the future (In the Roman Alphabet, that is). That website is packed with every future best seller, each one scattered all over the place and impossible to find.
Its like... being given your choice of one out of a billion identical chickens knowing that exactly one of them lays golden eggs, you just don't know which on it is. Helluva thing.
This is such an incredibly inspiring concept, and not just because the library exists online and someone took the time to calculate and program something that feels so interesting to use. The actual concept of a library that contains infinite information in labyrinth of identical hexagonal rooms is so fun to imagine, if it were a physical place. What stops it from collapsing under its own gravity? Does it have layers or is it an eternal flat plane of connected rooms? How is it accessed? What lives there, and for how long has it lived there? Prime roleplay material right there.
