Libraries are both entertaining and vast. Have you ever considered how huge it could be? Consider a library that has every book ever written. Isn't it enormous but very possible? What about a library that has EVERY POSSIBLE BOOK? You would think this is impossible, but you'd be mistaken; it is doable! Oh, and it's also available to everyone…
The Library of Babel is, originally, a short fiction by author Jorge Luis Borges that imagines a universe as a large library holding all conceivable 410-page volumes of a certain format and character set. “How fascinating of a fantasy world” you might say, until realising it’s a reality now.
Jonathan Basile is the creator of the aforementioned Library replica. He says he started the website in 2015 with the aid of his friends and family. If you do not look for a specific quote on this page, you will come across hexagonal rooms with four bookcase walls, five shelves per wall, and 32 volumes on each shelf. Select a chamber to observe, then a wall, a shelf, and lastly a book. You lift the hefty cover of the book and hover your eyes over the pages. "That's full of nonsense," you think to yourself. Yes, you are correct; it is all nonsense, but…
"You said every book..." you bewail. To have every POSSIBLE book, you must utilise every possible combination of the 26 English letters, space, comma, and period. Naturally, the majority of "every possible book," or 10^4677 books to be exact, would be nonsense. Did this bother your interest? Let me tell you something: your entire life is written in the page piles of this library. Yes, your entire life, down to the smallest detail! All of your passwords are also stored there. Do you still not believe me? Simply search for it.
Don't worry, it's not any different if you don't look for your password; it's already there; you just need to look hard enough.
"How is that even possible?" one could wonder, "wouldn't it be billions of gigabytes?". Yes, assuming all the books were stored. It would require 1 with about 2 million zeros following it in yottabytes, while Google has roughly 15-20 exabytes (1/1.000.000 of YB). So, how can it exist, even on the internet, and does it genuinely take up all that space? The simple answer is no. It wouldn't be very intelligent to store so much raw data, so the website uses an algorithm, which takes up 3.2mb of space. Because this algorithm understands how the library works, it builds books based on their seeds, at the moment you ask to look. And because those seeds are permanent, you'll find the exact same book every time you look at the same spot. Not much of a scam, but rather smart.
My favourite book in the Library is https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wow:76, please take a look yourself.