(This may veer towards “cool story bro”, but screw it)
There was this thing I used to think about when I was a kid: Imagine a single page of text and all of the possible combinations of letters and spaces and common punctuation that page could contain (in English). It’s a number you could calculate if you wanted to. Then imagine a vast library of all those pages and what they would contain.
In addition to a huge amount of gibberish it would also have an accurate summary of the life story of everyone who has ever existed, or will exist, or can (or can’t) exist, and every dream they ever (or never) had. Also, every possible INaccurate summary of all of the above … versions that are different by only one letter or comma, versions where the word “pineapple” appears at the beginning of every sentence … and so on. Every ridiculous thing imaginable would have its own page.
What blew my young mind was: you’d think the library would be infinite, but no … it’s an actual number you could calculate … and hey, maybe some kind of super-computer could run all the combinations and store them in its memory or print them out or something! A Super-Giant Library of Everything! People who understand math are smiling and shaking their heads at this point.
So today I finally did the math. To simplify things (I thought), I’d leave out all punctuation so there were only 27 options for each slot (either a letter or a space), and I looked up how many slots would be on an average page and decided these pages would have 3000. That’s 27^3000 for all possible combinations if my beer-addled brain has remembered its grade-school math properly.
The fact that the first two online calculators I tried couldn’t even handle the problem began to suggest that “It’s an actual finite number!” was much less remarkable than I had originally thought. To give myself some context, I looked up the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe and found the number to be in the 10^80 range. My Super-Giant Library of Everything was starting to look … a bit naive.
Anyway, yes … the number of pages in the library is so absurdly large that it might as well be infinity. Even if each page were the size of an atom, the amount of space it would take up would equal our observable universe multiplied by … yet another number that’s so absurdly large it might as well be infinity.
The funny part (for certain definitions of funny) is that my initial conception of the Library had books instead of pages.