vetta project

Imagine the world: all the countries, all the towns, all the cities, all the mega cities, and all the 6 billion people living in them.  Think about all the places you’ve been too, and all the places you haven’t been to, and just try to get a sense of the vastness of this for a moment…ok?

Now, try to imagine 20 times this scale.  A street with 100 people on it now has 2,000 people.  Regular two story family homes are now 40 story apartment blocks.  Big skyscrapers now have 2,000 floors and are 10 km high, taller than Mt. Everest.  Or if you prefer to go out, rather than up, take New York and drop another 19 of them around the United States.  Then do the same for Los Angeles… and so on for every city and every town, and continue this way across the whole world.  The planet would be burried under a seething mass of humanity.

That’s 120 billion people, approximately the number of neurons in your brain.

Now give each of these 120 billion people a cell phone, and load each one up with something like 5,000 phone numbers, mostly of people who live in the individual’s area.  Get everybody on this planet to start sending messages to each other.  Some only slowly send messages, others are busy sending 200 messages a second to all 5,000 people that they know.  Now let this system start to adapt in order to control which messages go where and when…

That’s about the scale of your brain.

When people say they can’t believe that the human brain is “just a machine”, I suspect they are suffering from a lack of imagination — have they seriously tried to wrap their mind around how unbelievably profoundly gigantic this machine actually is?