Monkeys, Binary, and Missing Meaning.

As I look for new employment and the adventures that come along with it, I've been spending a lot of late nights on the computer. Going to bed between 3 and 5 am, sleeping till late afternoon, rinse and repeat. Recently my dad woke up to take a pee one night and asked me what I was doing up so late.

"Just messing around. Like usual"

He kind of chuckled and said that I looked like I was really looking hard for something. Trying to figure something out or find something I lost. I didn't really give it much thought until I finally went to bed for the night several hours later.

His words got me thinking. I don't exactly stare at myself in mirrors so I don't know what I look like while "internetting". I'm never searching for anything in particular either, with exceptions to the times I'm actually working on a project. Am I searching for something without even realizing it?

By now we've all heard of the infinite monkey theorem. You know, the one that says if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with infinite time and infinite typewriters, the monkeys would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Taking that and combining it with a technological perspective, binary has a similar possibility. Everything computers do these days, be it playing a song or rendering a full length video game, is all done at the very basic level by binary code. The higher level code is translated to code that tells the processor which of its trillions of transistors to turn on or off. Everything that can be rendered digitally can be expressed using a bunch of zeroes and ones. Taking that further, if you have an infinitely large hard drive, and fill it endlessly with every binary combination possible, you could create a digital representation of anything ever. The best movie ever made, the future version of windows, or a treasured family memory that never existed. Everything can be made possible through the right combination of those two oddly significant numbers.

Recent numbers have shown that approximately 1/3 of the world's population is now active on the internet. Each one contributing their own strings of zeroes and ones to the massive pot we call the world wide web. Assuming 7 billion total people on earth, that means about 2.3 billion people are active on the internet (and increasing rapidly).

Usually humans can communicate ideas face to face, but the digital age has made this infinitely easier. Ideas now transcend time and space and you can access an idea from someone you never met that was created several years in the past. You can also collaborate instantaneously with anybody nearly anywhere through this connection and contribute. The internet is the complete aggregate of all human knowledge, and can be accessed anywhere at any time. Nearly every idea, every fact, every thing ever. If a human has said it, thought it, heard it, recorded it, or crossed paths with it in any way, its probably somewhere on the internet in some form. I realized this fact a while ago and it has never ceased amazing me since.

So keeping that idea in mind, is it so far fetched that some part of my brain is searching for meaning without me even realizing? What makes humanity so significant is our inherent curiosity. We don't want to just sit on earth and fly through space at a million miles an hour. We want to know why things work the way they do. We want to control our surroundings to our liking. Its evolution on steroids. Maybe all of us, up until the wee hours of the morning on the computer, are all subconsciously looking for something. For meaning perhaps? For inspiration? For motivation? Companionship? Justification? Something that we don't quite know how to express? Maybe this is the next stage in our intellectual evolution.

Or maybe the internet is just a place for cat pictures and we're all just cursed with ADD. I'm okay with that too.