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Show how big the numbers usually expressed in scientific notation (10^60) actually are.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the fi.rst-identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfring one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. ... Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book; those letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say.

L. J. Borges, The Library of Babel

Interactive library: https://libraryofbabel.info/

The idea here is that speculating about number of zeroes in the number or about number of atoms in the universe is not helping. Reader simply doesn't have the reference frame. They have no personal experience with number of atoms in the galaxy. The idea of "all possible books" is more personal, especially, when you realize the library contains a book that thruthfuly describes your life.

According to Borges, each page has 40 lines, each line has 80 characters. With 25 distinct characters, each page has ~2000 bytes, which is a plausible key size. It's also long enough that your adversaries key may be an exact description of your death. Brute-forcing a key means searching for a specific page in the library.

Librarian Jorge has once asserted that library contains all possible books. Nowadays we believe that it's not so. We, the Lesser Brothers, believe that it contains every possible page. There's no Portugese version of War and Peace with all wovels turned into "i". But, scattered throughout the library, you can find each page of such a book.

There's a page full of gibberish that, if applied as one-time pad to the first page of Mein Kampf, will turn it into the first page of Communist Manifesto.

Borges' point of view is obvious: He was an archetypal librarian and he enjoyed the idea of a library that contains all the books that were ever written or could have possibly been written. The library also contains a lot of garbage, meaningless letter soup, but that's just an unfortunate side effect. Cryptographer's point of view is completely opposite: The keyspace (the library) is is just a letter soup and that's how it is meant to be. As an unfortunate side effect, too small to be taken seriously, there are some keys that can be read as an intelligible text. The trick in this story should be to switch the point of view in such a way that what appears to be a indifferent mathematical construct (keyspace) turns into a library of life stories of all people who ever lived, all the books ever written, all the songs ever sung, all the secret thoughts ever thought.

There's a book in the library (some claim to have seen it but some argue that the text was just shamelessly copied from Ibn Khallikan) which recounts the story of an Indian monarch and the inventor of the game of chess. A hand-written comment on the margin allegedly says: "It was not until they've moved to the second half of the chessboard that the Khan overturned the chessboard and ordered his minister to be executed."


Some have proposed the gargantuan project to catalogize the library, but then one mathematician from a hexagon far away proved that any index, pointing to a specific book, would have to be as long as the book itself.