The Vastness of Chemical Space

The concept of chemical space is immensely vast and practically impossible to quantify. Even experts such as cheminformaticians struggle to estimate the total number of molecules within this space. A striking example is the molecule taxol, an anti-cancer drug. If one were to generate every possible permutation of its molecular structure along with all three-dimensional configurations of its constituent atoms, the resulting volume would occupy 1.5 universes. This illustrates the staggering complexity and enormity of chemistry.