What happens next?

Can we actually run out of ways of saying what we want to say? Mathematically that's probably not possible. There must be an infinite number of ways of repeating ourselves, though I wouldn't want to try. Some people find the right chord for themselves and stick with it. Others call it quits. But most of us seem to keep on going, expressing more or less the same thoughts over and over again. And even if that seems to goes on ad infinitum, it's a fair guess that anyone (and everyone) who might have been listening would stop at some point, making it a case of a tree falling in a forest not making a sound because nobody would be there to hear it.

But maybe it's possible to actually say it all, and then have nothing left to be said. What would happen then? Which is, of course, more or less the premise of Arthur C. Clarke's wonderful classic short story The Nine Billion Names of God.



Go to: Repeating myself.