Aug 5th, 2020

Author: donich_admin

The Nine Billion names of God

There is a great story by Arthur C Clarke. It involves two westerners visiting a Tibetan monastery where for hundreds of years, the monks have been engaged in cataloguing the nine billion names of God; when complete the world will end. They install a computer system to finish the task, without any belief that there will be any effect. The computer finishes the tasks in a few days, and as the engineers walk down back the hill they notice that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out”.

I think we may be coming close to running out of names.