Missing the Maestro

I can’t help it. How much fun would Borges be having with 2008? Consider these:

- Technology has created an infinite of new infinites that he might have played with

- Encyclopedias now rewrite themselves. Something can become true instantaneously.

- Identity is much less centered on our breathing, eating selves. We can have many identities. There would be many more characters in Borges and I.

- We probably could have fixed his eyes

- The Borges Experience could be extended through new media. Imagine a massive multiplayer Library of Babel, or Lottery in Babylon.

- We have the technology, random number generation could create all possible permutations of the 25 characters over 410 pages and use them to populate a world. We know exactly how much data that is, and in the era of the petabyte, I suspect it’s trivial.

- Shit, you could probably make money off of that. You could even start religions…

- Never mind. Borges was too smart. Apparently, the number of possible books contained in the Library of Babel is 251,312,000. Which means:

• If each book were an average sized paperback, the volume of these books is overwhelmingly larger than the volume of the universe


• That even of we someday achieve quantum memory storage devices (the most dense method of data storage postulated) and converted all of the matter in the universe to storage space, it still doesn’t approach the volume that would be required to store the library.


• In the story, a God Book is described that contains the answers to everything. The narrator worries it may have been destroyed, however is comforted by knowing that there would be many books that would only differ from the God Book by a character or two. A space here, omission of a comma. etc. In fact, if you measured all of the variations of the God Book that differ by only 12 characters…they alone would fill the universe.


• Damn, those exponents really add up quickly. Thanks to the various internet sources that basically just ruined my day.

I still miss the guy, and think he would have had a ball with the last 10 years, even if we couldn’t have built him his library; even if we killed all of his dreamtigers. Everything is expanding so rapidly. The scopes of our lives, the sum of our possibilities. We seem to be lacking that stern, erudite voice to warn us where the line is between wondrous and abominable.