THE LIBRARY OF BABEL

Picture a library in which the books on its shelves contain every possible combination of letters and numbers. It is almost impossible to imagine this since we might think that a library like this would need an infinite amount of space. It gets crazier when you think that every possible combination, for example every poem ever written and every poem that will ever be written in the future, is somewhere in a book on one of the shelves of this library. With this library, you could uncover the greatest works of art in the past and predict the greatest ones in the future. You would also have every historic event that was lost in time, and you would have an idea of every possible future event that may happen to every person alive today or in the future. This library would also contain how you would die in the future. This library actually exists. It is called the Library of Babel, which was created by Jonathan Basile at www.libraryofbabel.info.

Basile spent more than six months trying to create this library. During the process, however, he discovered that the library would require more digital storage than could fit in the whole universe. That is why he decided to make the task more manageable by utilizing digital books that are 410 pages long and contain 3,200 characters per page. Still, with the limitations he put in place, he calculated that the number of these digital books would be somewhere around 102,000,000, which is a huge number. After a few tweaks he made in the algorithm of the program, his library now contains 104,677 books. You can actually go to the website of the library and search a 3,200-character text. You will be surprised to see that something you have never shared with anyone before has been in one of the pages of a book in this library.