Consider two planets, both completely devoid of anything resembling life or intelligence. Anyone who looks at either one of them sees an unremarkable hunk of rock of no particular value. In one of them, the center consists of more unremarkable rock. In the other, however, hidden beneath the surface is a cache that consists of replicas of every museum and library that currently exists on Earth, but which will never be found or seen by anyone (because nobody is going to bother to look that hard at an unremarkable hunk of rock). Does the existence of the second hunk of rock have more value than the first?
Not by any non-negligible extent. If I had to choose one of the two all other things being equal, I’d pick the latter, but if I had to pay five dollars to pick the latter I’d pick the former.
Try this one: pick something, anything you want. How much would you value if it existed outside the universe? Use an expanding universe to throw it irrevocably outside your future light cone if “existing outside the universe” is making your brain cringe. Or use a cycling crunch/bang universe, and suppose it existed before the last crunch.
Assuming the non-existence of some entity which eventually disassembles and records everything in the entire universe (and thus finds the library, violating your condition that it’s never found)? Then, at least to me, the answer to your question is: nope.
Let’s try a variant...
Consider two planets, both completely devoid of anything resembling life or intelligence. Anyone who looks at either one of them sees an unremarkable hunk of rock of no particular value. In one of them, the center consists of more unremarkable rock. In the other, however, hidden beneath the surface is a cache that consists of replicas of every museum and library that currently exists on Earth, but which will never be found or seen by anyone (because nobody is going to bother to look that hard at an unremarkable hunk of rock). Does the existence of the second hunk of rock have more value than the first?
Not by any non-negligible extent. If I had to choose one of the two all other things being equal, I’d pick the latter, but if I had to pay five dollars to pick the latter I’d pick the former.
Try this one: pick something, anything you want. How much would you value if it existed outside the universe? Use an expanding universe to throw it irrevocably outside your future light cone if “existing outside the universe” is making your brain cringe. Or use a cycling crunch/bang universe, and suppose it existed before the last crunch.
Assuming the non-existence of some entity which eventually disassembles and records everything in the entire universe (and thus finds the library, violating your condition that it’s never found)? Then, at least to me, the answer to your question is: nope.