Finite Number of Possible Books
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If you took a 10×10 chess board and randomly decided which squares were black and white (you can have more of one color than another if you want) … the amount of possible chessboards you could create is so large … we cannot possibly comprehend the enormity of that number. From our limited human experience … the number might as well be infinite. Thats the result of taking a simple binary variable (black or white) in a string of only 100 of them. It’s an extremely small string of variables but the combinations end up being within the range of all the particles in the known universe.
With books we bump up the variables and strings. With letters you have 26 possible variables per string, and the strings can go on for say, upto 1000 pages (assuming that’s as big a a book should be). Factor out the nonsense words and the amount of possible books is so far higher than our chess board number … it pretty much is infinity. By the end of a large sentence you already have as many possible strings as a modified chess board. That’s sentence 1 of say 33 sentences per page and upto a 1000 pages. The number of comprehensible meaningful books…is so high…if every human who ever existed on Earth read all those possible books for a million years, you’d have read less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth (etc) of all the possible books. If everyone made 100 clones of themselves and populated the universe and they all read these books, we’d only make an ever so slightly larger dent. We’d have to clone ourselves again and again until the point that there are no more molecules left in the universe for anything else…and even then we really haven’t read a lot of the possible books out there. We’d have to somehow burst open some hole in time and space and go to alternate universes (if they exist) and populate all of them with book reading humans. I suppose if our clones kept cloning themselves and convert universe after universe into factories of book reading humans….eventually…once you have fully done that with say an octillian octillian octillian octillian (to the power of a very high number) universes…you might have read about 0.1% of all possible books.
As for knowledge, if it has to be realized and stored in the form of human language…the limits of knowledge about the universe would be limited only by the number of people who can study it and the amount of parallel universes we can crack open and covert into human knowledge learning factories.
(all of this assumes the universe is limited to some extent. If it wasn’t…we’d never learn everything cause there would always be some place we’ve never been to).
So our numbers might as well be infinite. The possible books we can make is virtually endless, physically impossible to print, unable to be read within the confines of our enormous universe and would require an utter destruction of almost everything that exists to even print out an index of the titles of all of those books. Knowledge is even worse because there is no page limit to knowledge and the amount of angles you can view something from, and the concepts to propose and play with and how that knowledge all interrelates (with intercontextuality) makes that quantity of books look like a tiny library.
The books and knowledge isn’t infinite…but it might as well be.
@regthefronkeyfarmer, nice list. I think I read Hotel New Hampshire about 30 years ago. Sometimes, I think I should read more of those old classics. Thanks to your recommendation, I just bought “The Orphan Master’s Son”. Some that I have liked –
Off for the Sweet Hereafter by TR Pearson.
almost anything by Jerzy Kosinski, especially The Painted Bird and Being There.
1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann.
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild.
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond.
The Slave Ship, by Marcus Rediker,
Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon,
and currently reading “Why Buddhism is True, by Robert Wright.
I admit, I read some these days by audiobook, and of those listen several times.
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