Theoretically infinite is a useful
concept.
It refers to something which ought to be infinite, but really isn't.
Let us take the number of nodes everything can have.
It's theoretically infinite, because:
- The namespace on Everything is theoretically infinite
- The number space on Everything is theoretically infinite
In
practice, we run up against
difficulties and
barriers such as:
- The upper limit of 32-bit numbers, or whatever size number the database server uses. At some point, the database software everything runs on will run out of numbers to store nodes under.
- Upper limit in disk space on Linux. Course, you can always recompile, but at some point a limit is reached. This is a practically infinite limit, because adding one bit more in the disk space address word causes an exponential increase in available disk space. So by the time you hit 128 bit words, you can use the universe for data storage, because you'll be able to individually address atoms. Course, I doubt that Everything will use the universe for data storage. They'll probably stop if they have to do more than a couple terabytes of storage... Maybe :)
- Search times Search times will increase as we add more nodes. The question is, linear, logarithmic, or exponential increases? At some point, we'll have a problem.
So, as you can see,
the number of nodes on everything is
theoretically infinite, but not necessarily
practically so.