Billions

From Biohack

What is the importance of working with billions of cells at once? The ecoli colonies alone could have billions of cells in a small petri dish. This is essentially massive parallelism, and there are two massively complex systems that illustrate this concept elsewhere in nature -- particularly the mammalian brain, and the internet. Bacteria are not tissues, but perahps some whiz can figure out how to make them communicate more like mammalian tissues do.

Bacteria in a dish gives you the opportunity to work with massively parallel, highly complex systems, leading to the arts of complexity science, evolutionary engineering and programming, if you're up to it. It might sound scary, but we're just now pioneering and mapping the territory, so there is very little about this topic to be 'hard' about.

Putting a billion into a perspective

I once had a biology teacher that said, "This generation seems to have a pretty good concept of what a million is. Back in my day, a million was really out there, but these days it is different. Now, a billion. That's just ten hundred million, right? Not quite. That does not illustrate or fit into your mind the vastness of the number, what it has the potential to represent. A billion is the number of seconds in thirty one years, it's the entirety of all of those experiences that you can have in that amount of time. A billion is ridiculously large." And then there's the Douglas Adams quote: astronomical numbers are simply too large to fit within the mind of a human. But let's change that. -- Kanzure 17:41, 6 February 2008 (PST)

Numbers in context

The images here try to convey the idea behind the statistics, which can feel pretty meaningless.