CurlyShavings

The Total Perspective Vortex is a device from the imagination of Douglas Adams. It was designed to give the viewer

just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

It occurred to me that we may not need to wait for a fairy cake to implement the Total Perspective Vortex. (Fairy cake, you'll remember, was necessary to extrapolate the whole of creation and then show all of it to the intended victim.) We don't need fairy cake because we have Google. The entirety of the known universe is stored in Google.

Why would I say something so preposterous? Well, if Google is our entry point to this universe, it doesn't really matter that a page isn't indexed because you're not likely to ever land on it. So for the purposes of this argument, Google is the known universe.

So, on one side, we've extrapolated the entire creation and into the other side, we plug YOU.

Go for it, you've done it before and you can do it again. Google your name. Your whole name, your name in "quotes", your nickname, whatever.

How many pages must you scroll through before finding a reference to YOU? Out of the more than one trillion pages in Google, how many of them refer to YOU?

Are YOU on the first page? Is there more than one YOU? Does the rest of the universe have plenty of source material about YOU?

And this is what we find:

The whole infinite Universe. The Infinite suns. The Infinite distances between them, and yourself. An invisible dot on an invisible dot. Infinitely small.*

Of course, there are other ways that Google implements the Total Perspective Vortex. Here's someone who thinks that Google has implemented a reverse Total Perspective Vortex using Google Earth. And here's another example from a different source.

And here's another example, this time, of someone who is knowingly creating a cosmos in which he (and his family) are the primary persons.

Wait. Didn't I just describe blogging in general?