Libraries

The podcast Punto Bernal is made by the professor Jorge Zuluaga from the University of Antioquia in Medellín and Antonio Bernal, who was an outreach worker at the Planetarium of Medellín, and is now working at the Fabra Observatory, Spain. They make a super cool, interesting and espontaneus podcast about astronomy.

Professor Jorge Zuluaga said in this episode of the podcast: Números Gigantes (Giant Numbers), that the number of books in the tale: “The Library of Babel” by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, is one of the most gigantic numbers calculated so far. Wikipedia says that making some assumptions the calculation is: 1,956 x 10 ^ 1'834.097 (1,956 x 10 to the power of 1'834.097). And this is not even close to infinity. This number, we can't even imagine it, but we never stop trying!

For example, it was estimated that by 2023, there would be around 158'464,880 books published in our society, or 1,584 x 10 ^ 8 (1,584 x 10 to the power of 8), just to give a comparative idea of the orders of magnitude: 8 vs. 1'834,097.

In this image of the post, we can see the spiral from where the Library of Babel is expanding. This idea is very natural and recurrent in the human mind: the record of everything that has been lived, hidden somewhere in our universe or universes. It may be that when we pass to the other side (of life), we can go through the stories of the origin of the universe, and the record of every star, galaxy, planet, meteorite, bolide, asteroid, stardust, and so many events that happen in this “eternal” spacetime. Could it be that a technology like the detection of gravitational waves can tell us things of this kind, apparently yes, so we'll see how far we get...

Library, then, is that dear and cared place, where the treasures of time are kept, and it is the image we usually evoke to recreate stories with “infinite” scope. Let us feel fortunate, because right now, we have the possibility of accessing high quality knowledge, made available by entities from all over the planet and of great scientific, economic, social, historical and many other areas of knowledge. We can see the universe as our ancestors could never have imagined it, let's build humanity with that <3 !