The Limits of Knowledge

I think I could read three books in a single day if I tried, but it would require me spending the day doing nothing else. There would be no time for work, conversations, cooking, or any other basic activities. Because of this, it feels like I could only read at that rate for a single day. I couldn’t keep putting the rest of my life on hold. Eventually, I would have to go back to doing everything else.

But if somehow, a person who lived to be 100 managed to do this every day of their life, they would have read roughly 110,000 books by the time they die. When I think about this, it seems incredible, but it’s still a small accomplishment compared to the number of books they could have read. Although I couldn’t find an exact number, it seems the number of books available is in the tens of millions. This means a person whose read more than I consider humanly possible still hasn’t finished one percent of what the world has to offer.