I was thinking recently about how images work at the data level, and it kind of broke my brain.
Take a simple case: a 3×3 pixel image with only black and white pixels. There are only 9 pixels, and each has 2 options (black or white), so the total number of possible unique images is:
2^9 = 512
That’s tiny, you could generate and look at every one of those images in a few seconds. But already, you’re looking at the complete universe of 3×3 B/W images. Every possible shape, face, glitch, symbol, if it can exist in that resolution and color range, it’s already in there.
Now scale up.
A 1920×1080 image (full HD), with each pixel using 24-bit RGB (i.e., 16.7 million colors), has:
(2^24)^(1920×1080) = 2^49,766,400 ≈ 10^14,983,365
That number is incomprehensibly massive. It’s orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe (≈10⁸⁰). And yet, it’s finite.
Which means:
- Every possible frame of every possible movie is mathematically there.
- Every photo you never took exists in this space.
- Every piece of digital art, every childhood memory, every face, every impossible scene, all of it is representable by just one of those possible combinations.
Of course, almost all of those images are noise. Pure entropy. But buried in that space is literally everything.
Makes you wonder, are we creating images? Or are we just exploring a tiny, meaningful subset of a space that already contains them all?
The Sloot Digital Coding System is an alleged data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — which, if true, would dramatically disprove Shannon's source coding theorem, a widely accepted principle of information theory that predicts how much data compression of a digital file is mathematically possible. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999,[1] Nieuwegein), an electronics engineer from the Netherlands.[2] Several demonstrations of his coding system convinced high-profile investors to join his company, but a few days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified, and the playback device he used for demonstrations was found to have contained a hard disk drive, contrary to what he told investors.