Lets say you have a bowl filled with 100 rocks. 1 is painted red, 1 is painted green, and 98 of the rocks are unpainted. What percentage of the rocks in the bowl are painted?
This is a fairly standard math problem for teaching percentages – and the answer of course is 2%. Conversely, if I asked what percentage of the rocks in the bowl are unpainted, the answer is 98%, and if I ask how many are red, the answer is 1%. Simple, right?
Now lets take it a step farther. What if I have 1000 rocks total, but only 2 are painted, still 1 red and 1 green. Now the percentage of red rocks falls to .1%. And this can continue, until the point that the percentage of painted rocks is essentially 0%.
Now, you are probably thinking: Sure, but wouldn’t the bowl be huge with that many rocks? Not necessarily. Not all rocks are the same size – and nothing in the word problem specified sizes for any of the objects involved. Ultimately, Sand is just small rocks – and some estimates put a mere 1 cubic foot (30cm x 30cm x 30cm) of sand (which would fit in a regular serving bowl) at around 1 BILLION tiny rocks. So if I fill my bowl with 1 BILLION grains of sand, then throw 2 big painted rocks on top – the bowl still contains 1 red rock, 1 green rock, and 1 BILLION unpainted rocks.. Meaning that the percentage of painted rocks is basically 0 by any practical measurement.
You might say sure, but my odds of grabbing a painted rock are much higher – since it is impossible to grab a single grain of sand… But realistically your odds of grabbing one of the big rocks without picking up at least a few hundred or thousands grains of sand attached to it are also zero, so I’d say picking a single rock from the bowl is simply impossible in either case. It also doesn’t affect the pure mathematical percentages.
Another thing you are probably thinking by now is: What does this have to do with Nihilism?
Well, here is where we step back and take this in a more conceptual direction. If we use the same format for determining what percentage of something is in a fixed space – then instead of a bowl, lets go with a generic 1 cubic meter of space, which we can move to whatever location we want to test. Inside that space, instead of rocks we have literally everything that exists within that defined space. In addition to all of the things in that space, there is always, conceptually… Nothing. If we treat Nothing as its own object within the space – it logically doesn’t take up any space.. Not even as much as a grain of sand. So, logically, to fill the space with Nothing requires INFINITE quantities of Nothing. Everything else in the space will, by definition, have a finite quantity present – as even light itself is transmitted by physical particles we’ve begun to quantify and measure. Thus, mathematically, any finite number divided by infinity is automatically defined as 0. So, in any given space, 0% is filled with anything – and 100% is filled with Nothing!
What better case for Nihilism can there be? We have mathematically proven that everything is Nothing anyway – so Nothing is all that matters!
Or so one can make the case, anyway.
Of course, there is a reason we typically do percentages by volume rather than by quantity of items. Going by volume, the percentage of Nothing is either 50% if we use a definition of Nothing that still exists when overlaid with something, or 0% if we treat Nothing as the absence of something, that ceases to exist once something is there. Though even then they say most of the space within an atom is empty – so really most of the space in any given area by volume is still nothing..
In any case, it is an interesting rabbit hole to wander down sometimes.