the time it would take to generate the correct one and every possible permutation of every incorrect versions would take up more space than the total volume of our planet, not to mention the time it would take to produce all those volumes.
I won't even address the impossibility of finding enough paper to write down all these books, but as for the sheer number of volumes that could be produced if paper was an inexhaustible resource... Oh, the total number of possible versions of Hamlet would take up more space than is available on the entire Earth, I'm certain! Consider. How many versions of Hamlet are mathematically possible? Let's start with all the versions that are
exactly like the correct one except for
one misplaced letter. The maximum number of such versions that can exist is equal to the total number of letters making up the Shakespeare's original text. There is one such version where the first letter is wrong, one where the second letter is wrong, one where the third letter is wrong etcetera.
Now consider the number of versions that have
two wrong letters. There must be many more of those, because you have to consider all the possible combinations of misplaced letters! The wrong letters could be letter number one and two, or one and three, or one and four, or one and five, or.... But then there are also the ones where the wrong letters are number two and three, or two and four, or two and five, or two and.... And then there are all the possible combinations where one of the wrong letters is always three, and one where it is always four, and... you get it. And how many combinations are there where
three letters are wrong? You can go on and on like this, and even though we'll eventually reach a point where text is too garbled to be considered a version of Hamlet at all, I'm sure it's possible to lose pretty much all of William Shakespeare's original words and still consider the text a version of Hamlet. I think it would be possible to cover every square inch of the Earth's land mass with books that are different versions of Hamlet, and it is even conceivable that this "Hamlet-book-cover" smothering the Earth might be, perhaps, several feet thick!
So much for every conceivable version of Hamlet... when you start considering every conceivable version of every book in existence - every cookbook, every phonebook, every do-it-your-self handbook etcetera, plus every conceivable version of pure noise and nonsense, you have to wonder if the universe itself would be big enough to house this monstrous library! (Although admittedly we humans tend to underestimate the size of the universe most grievously, which is why people find it so easy to accept that Jor-El and Lara sent their son to Earth, and then later Zara and Ching brought him to New Krypton, from which he later returned to the Earth without having been gone for more than a few years at most.)
Anyway, speaking of the number of possible mathematical combinations. The number of possible books you could generate by randomly creating words with the alphabet is truly staggering, but it is
not infinite. Similarly, the number of combinations that the universe itself can come up with using its own smallest building blocks of matter and energy is not infinite, either. This means that if the universe is sufficiently overwhelmingly large, it will eventually have to repeat itself. This in turn means that if the universe is large enough, it will eventually have to create
the Earth all over again. Actually, assuming the universe sufficiently big, there is a mindbogglingly staggering number of other Earths that are
almost exactly like our Earth. And there may also be one that is
exactly like our Earth - or there may be
two such perfect Earth twins, again assuming that the universe is large enough. On such an Earth, all of us FoLCs would exist just the way we are here and now, and we would be communicating with each other over the internet, reading each other's stories, watching each other's videos and discussing Lois and Clark and Off Topic and stuff, and there, like here, Sammy Sparrow would have sat on a train one day, writing a new chapter of Begin the Begin, when suddenly her pen ran out and she didn't have a spare one. But there may be many more Earths where Sammy
did have a spare pen, and several where her pen didn't run out, and one where she actually looks like Lois is her delightful avatar, and....
Ann (suddenly getting dizzy
)