Monkeying Around for a Very Long Time (Leads to Nothing)
Planet of the Planck Apes!!
If every Friday could start out like this! Using a version of Borges ‘total library concept’ we are treated to a re-conceptualizing of what is ultimately Russell’s Paradox (the set of all sets does/does not include itself causing a contradiction thus destroying any attempt of providing a logical foundation of mathematics) - the ‘Catalog of all catalogs that don’t list themselves’:
the librarian cannot include it in its own listing, because then it would belong in the other catalog, that of catalogs that do include themselves. However, if the librarian leaves it out, the catalog is incomplete. Either way, it can never be a true catalog of catalogs that do not list themselves
From here it’s just a hop-skip-and-a-jump to agonizing over the concept of ‘everything’: that is the complete contents of the volumes of the Borges Total Library (cf. his 1939 essay “The Total Library” (“La biblioteca total”)) on the one hand, and problematizing (literally, not polemically) this ‘everything’ notion on the the other hand by the ultimate re-statement of the classic ‘immortal-ish monkeys on typewriters typing away for eternity’ and the ridiculous time scale involved. Basically, very little sense can be made of the time scale involved for the little guys to actually come up with anything sensible, let alone an entire Shakespearean sonnet, Aeschylus’ The Egyptians or the entire contents of the British Museum (not to mention more fanciful imaginary volumes, e.g. “my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934”).
There’s a tinge of sadness to the thought that even give the rate of one keystroke per Planck time (approx. 5.39 * 10^-44 seconds for each keystroke - read the post!) the hardworking tiny little Plank monkey’s still couldn’t come up with much more than the first four lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 within the age of the universe (and there’s only a one in three chance this would happen anyway). But cheer up because at least we are comforted by the fact that out brains (the outcome of only a few billion years of evolutionary banging out of genetic keystrokes themselves) can’t be outdone by rote Plancking.
[Planck Hair]
Monkey’s of the Cosmos, you fail us and we thank you.
