📚 The Library of Babel: the place where everything you can imagine already exists

🔗 Link to the library: https://libraryofbabel.info

Have you heard of the Library of Babel?

No, it’s not your local public library, with a librarian asking you to keep your voice down. We’re talking about a library so gigantic that it would make the Internet look like a simple Post-it note.

The Library of Babel is an idea imagined by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in his short story published in 1941. Borges describes a library made up of an infinite number of hexagonal rooms, containing an infinite number of books.

And when I say an infinite number of books, I’m not exaggerating.

This library would contain:

• every book that has ever been written;
• every book that will be written in the future;
• every possible story;
• every imaginable truth;
• every error, lie, and absurdity;
• your complete biography;
• your perfect pancake recipe;
• and probably a book explaining why you put off that important task until tomorrow again.

The concept is simple, yet mind-boggling: the library contains every possible combination of characters. Each page is made up of letters, symbols, spaces, and punctuation marks. Most of the books are therefore completely incomprehensible… but somewhere in the middle of this gigantic alphabet soup, there are also perfectly coherent sentences.

In other words, if you search long enough, you can find a sentence that sums up your life, an exact prediction of your future, or even proof that you were right during that argument ten years ago.

The problem is that you may have to search through a few billion libraries before you find it. 😅

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🌌 A library that contains the entire universe… and probably its opposite

You could compare this library to some kind of book of the gods, bringing together every possibility:

• the past;
• the present;
• the future;
• events that happened;
• events that will never happen;
• the decisions we made;
• the decisions we could have made;
• and every alternate version of our existence.

In this library, there is a book in which you become famous, another in which you give everything up to raise goats in the mountains, another in which you earn twenty thousand Hive Power on PeakD.com… and probably another in which you never discover blockchain.

There is even a book in which you became president of the world.

Unfortunately, it must be shelved somewhere between:

“How to Fix a Printer with a Banana”
and
“The True Recipe for Happiness Written in Klingon.”

Good luck finding it. 🤷‍♂️

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🔍 I decided to test the library

For fun, I searched for two completely opposite sentences.

The first sentence was:

“One day I will have twenty thousand Hive Power on PeakD.com.”

And surprisingly, the sentence appears several times in different books in the Library of Babel.

📖 First appearance

The sentence appears three times in three different books.

📖 Another appearance

On one occasion, it appears by itself in the book:

Title: uzcvlfozxotrrkdltj
Page: 285

📖 And somewhere else again

The same sentence also appears in the book:

Title: egdzf
Page: 120

And it seems to appear on other pages, in other books as well.

At that point, I thought the universe might be trying to send me a message.

Or perhaps it’s simply a machine that is very good at generating combinations of letters.

But I prefer to believe the first possibility. It’s much more motivating. 😄

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🚫 The opposite sentence also exists

Next, I searched for the opposite sentence:

“I would never have twenty thousand Hive Power on PeakD.com.”

And, of course, this sentence also exists in the Library of Babel.

The library therefore contains both:

“I will succeed”

and:

“I will never succeed.”

That doesn’t help us much when it comes to making a decision, but it sums up the Internet, social media, and conversations with ourselves at 3 a.m. rather well.

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✍️ Write anything… and you will probably find it

You can have fun entering almost any sentence into the search engine.

Once you have thought of a sentence, it is very likely to exist somewhere in the library.

You can try:

• a funny sentence;
• an absurd sentence;
• a prediction;
• your declaration of love;
• your shopping list;
• the password you use everywhere — but please don’t actually do that, just to be safe;
• or even a completely made-up sentence.

I tried a few combinations and found results in books with titles as poetic as:

Book title: umixpxmcujvqqouuhcksjd
Page: 202

Well… the title may not be exactly that, but you get the idea: the library’s marketing department hasn’t put in much effort yet.

Another result:

Title: m ylh,vefagoo,.
Page: 335

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🧑‍💻 Search for your name

You can also search for your first and last name, then try different variations:

• first name + last name;
• last name + first name;
• with or without accents;
• with a spelling mistake;
• with your ridiculous old username from 2008.

You will almost certainly find an occurrence somewhere.

But be careful: finding your name in a book does not necessarily mean that the library knows your destiny.

It mostly means that it contains so many combinations that, statistically speaking, it eventually contains your name, your neighbor’s name, your cat’s name, and probably your neighbor’s cat’s name too.

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📜 So… coincidence, destiny, or divine plan?

This idea raises a rather fascinating question:

If every possible sentence already exists somewhere, does that mean our destiny is written?

Perhaps there is a book containing the complete plan of our lives.

But there are also thousands of other books telling a different, contradictory, or completely false version of that same life.

So how can we know which one is the right one?

That’s where things get interesting.

The Library of Babel can represent:

• the infinity of knowledge;
• the confusion between truth and lies;
• the limits of our understanding;
• chance;
• destiny;
• or even the difficulty of finding useful information within an infinite amount of data.

It’s a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack… except that the haystack is the size of the universe, the needles are mixed in with billions of fake needles, and some of them are written in Hebrew.

By the way:

תודה שקראתם
Toda shakratam
“Thank you for reading” in Hebrew.

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🧭 Set out in search of your destiny

You can also explore the library manually, room by room and page by page.

You may find:

• your future;
• the answer to a question you have been asking yourself;
• a sentence you thought you were the only person to imagine;
• the meaning of life;
• or simply a string of letters that looks like the name of an experimental drug.

If you believe that you have free will and that your thoughts are personal, keep in mind that they may still be written somewhere in this library.

But don’t worry: the fact that a thought exists in a book does not mean that it was imposed on you.

After all, in this library, there is also a book claiming exactly the opposite.

And probably a third book explaining why the first two are wrong. 😄

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🎲 Your turn!

Go to:

🔗 https://libraryofbabel.info

Enter a sentence, your name, a prediction, or something completely absurd.

Then share your best results in the comments!

What will you find?

• An incredible prediction?
• A philosophical sentence?
• A declaration of love forgotten for centuries?
• Proof that you are destined to own 20,000 Hive Power?
• Or simply the word “banana” repeated 300 times?

The Library of Babel is waiting for you.

And somewhere, in one of its countless books, the comment you are about to write under this post surely already exists. 📚✨

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