The Physiology of Things

Even if you put every human alive today into the Grand Canyon, we still couldn't fill it. We were only able to construct a pile in a very small section of the canyon. All of us—all 7.159 billion of us—are represented there. This also puts humanity into perspective. Humans spit up roughly one to two liters every day, so over the course of a lifetime, you won't create enough saliva to fill an Olympic-sized pool all at once. The entire amount of sand grains on Earth is thought to be 7.5 x 10 to the 18th, while 560 billion Lego parts have already been produced.

But here's the thing: What's the total number of things?

So how exactly do you define something? So, let's assume it exists. If you're able to contemplate or discuss it. Anything you can refer to as a thing is a thing. This will encompass a wide range of items. Ideas are things, and things can be real, fictional, or impossible. Things can also be anticipated or past. or yellow, tangible or immaterial things.

Some events are more likely to occur than others. I'm now writing a piece about the sheer volume of things. Let's add everything up. The solution appears simple at first glance. The term "thing" is so ambiguous that the answer is either infinite or unknowable. All we need to do is count up as many actual objects as possible—things that exist in the real world and are outside the realm of our imagination—and then, theoretically, measure and add as many more objects as we can think of. the total amount of conceivable thoughts.

Let's suppose for the purposes of this article that numbers, math, and the rules of physics are a natural component of our universe. However, the names and representations that have been given to them are the work of thinking minds, and we can count on those things. There is no need to double-count, either. The entity known as me is made up of the same indivisible components, whether they be particles, strings, or anything else.

There's a nice remark about this from Abraham Lincoln. If a sheep's tail counts as a leg, how many legs does it actually have? Four, because just because something is called a leg, it isn't. We reach an impasse when trying to enumerate all the physical objects in the cosmos. The universe is how big? The size of the cosmos may be endless. Or, for a variety of reasons, it might be finite but edgeless. There might be other universes as well. However, it's uncertain whether we'll ever be able to see all of these things. Instead, we are left with the observable universe, which has a future sight limit of only 62 billion light-years in either direction. This is what we are stuck with, and what we typically mean when we say "the universe." All done. We'll probably never have to worry about anything other than this inventoriable space. And it has, on average, between ten and eighty constituent particles. As far as we know, these particles have no other internal components.

So that's our response, correct? Beyond our own minds, there are between 10 and 80 physical things that exist. All other physical objects, such as water, dogs, planets, and saxophones, are simply different configurations of those same 10 to 80 particles by different names. But hold on, what if?

We'll learn more about what we currently refer to as elementary particles in the future actually comprise smaller components that we ought to have counted instead? Let's count the greatest number of the smallest measurable thing in order to be safe.

Within our observable universe, something the size of a Planck volume 10 to the power of 183 things that small might fit. It was difficult to establish that there were additional items in the actual, physical universe. Yet, you could envision. Planck volume is equal to Planck length. Not the smallest possible space, but rather the smallest quantity of space that can be measured. A 10,000th of a Planck volume, or half of one, is imaginable. But it would only be a thought, and nothing more. So, how many different ideas are there? It's generally safe to conclude that there are an endless amount of thoughts that could occur. Consider numbers. You cannot assert that the largest number we can conceive has an upper bound. Do unthought thoughts already exist, however, in contrast to physical things, which exist whether or not we have found them? It seems more like the universe of ideas is really just one thing, and actual components of that universe don't become things on their own until we think about them, that is, until we or another mind considers them or speaks of them, and there is a limit to the number of ideas we or anything else could ever consider.

When the supply of gas required to create new stars runs out, which will take somewhere between 1 trillion and 100 trillion years, the lights will begin to dim one star at a time. Nothing will be able to calculate the maximum number of thoughts that could be thought inside our observable universe after a Google year, when the universe's remaining usable energy will be zero. Let's take all of that mass and make it into human brains that imagine only brand-new ideas at random from the beginning of time until the universe runs out of energy that can be used. What if there are faster-thinking brains out there—they might even be Earthling brains, for all we know. Instead of converting all of that mass into human brains, let's use it to create a massive imaginary machine that computes as quickly as it can give the speed of light in the uncertainty principle; Bremermann's equation. Limit its 1.36 x 10 to the 50th bits per second per kilogram of material; currently, the highest estimate for the total mass of the observable universe is 3.4 x 10 to the 60 kilograms, which, when used exclusively for the best computing device, could process 4.624 x 10 to the 110 bits per second.

Now that we know that there are 3.154 x 10 to the 116 seconds between the beginning of time and the universe's heat death, and that the average thought contains about 800 bits of information, we can calculate that there are 1.458 x 10 to the 227 things that could ever be thought of or imagined. That amount is enormous. The number of thoughts that can be thought in the observable universe as we shall ever know it is so much greater than the number of physical things that can exist without imagination that, if you added the two totals together, the number of physical things would hardly make a difference.

So it's ironic that everything in the cosmos ultimately boils down to what we think.