Spilled Milk

I’m not sure when I first stumbled across the Library of Babel (the website, not the book), but it has fascinated me since I was introduced. The library contains every possible combination of letters, spaces, and commas/periods under 3200 total characters. So anything you think is an original sentence or thought, is already on the internet, existing as a record in the Library of Babel. In fact, this entire paragraph is in the Library (missing a few characters, given the library character-set). Check it out here, amongst the scrambled letters and spaces.

It’s a pretty fascinating idea – that any seemingly original thought, idea, song, etc. in fact already exists! It’s the same theory that tells us if you gave a monkey a typewriter, and allowed him to type forever, he would eventually write Shakespeare’s sonnets. Pretty neat.

What I stumbled across today was potentially more interesting, and potentially even disturbing. The library has expanded to now permeate every possible combination of 4096 different colors, across a 416×640 pixel grid. What this means is that every photo in your camera roll also exists on this website. There may be small variations and the quality isn’t the highest, but I performed a handful of reverse image searches against the database, and to be frank, its a bit unsettling.

Not only was I able to find multiple images of myself, varying slightly in how accurate they were, it also begs the question of: what other not-real photos are there of me? If there’s a photo of me sitting on a plane (which exists), that means there’s also a photo of me on the same plane, only butt-ass naked! This photo isn’t real in the sense that I never took it, but it is real in the sense that it does exist. By generating every single possible combination of colored pixels, there’s no limit to what these pictures could theoretically hold.

One small reassurance I’ll offer is that although this concept seems scary, it’s virtually impossible to find any image by simply browsing. There are 10⁹⁶¹⁷⁵⁵ unique images generated by this process. An overwhelming, overwhelming, overwhelming majority of these look like television static. After all, its just random colors at every pixel. I browsed through some images for 5-10 minutes and didn’t find a single one that resembled anything natural or worldly.

So even though it exists, we may not need be scared of it.