To properly understand the difference between organisms and computing, let’s ask if any computer can accurately simulate the activities of »a single cell – over an interval of »one second.

Me: How much computing power would be required to accurately simulate all the activities of a eukaryotic cell over 1 second?

Google Bard: The amount of computing power required to accurately simulate all the activities of a eukaryotic cell over 1 second is a very large number. One estimate is that it would require about 10^23 (1 septillion) FLOPS (floating point operations per second). This is a number that is difficult to comprehend, but it gives you an idea of the scale of the challenge.

To put this number in perspective, the most powerful supercomputer in the world today, the Fugaku, has a peak performance of about 415 petaFLOPS. This means that it would take the Fugaku about 390 million years to simulate the activities of a single cell over 1 second.

Of course, this is just an estimate, and the actual amount of computing power required would depend on a number of factors, such as the level of detail that is required in the simulation. However, it is clear that accurately simulating 1 second of a cell’s activity would require a very large amount of computing power.

Ortiz, L., et al. (2009). “Computational complexity of single-cell molecular dynamics simulations.” BMC Systems Biology. 3(1): 10.

Adcock, M. J., et al. (2013). “Computational requirements for molecular dynamics simulations of single cells.” Nature Methods. 10(5): 404-407.

Lane, D. J. (2015). “The computational cost of simulating a single cell.” BMC Systems Biology. 9(1): 104.

Over the span of one second, a single cell in our body conducts more intelligent ‘operations’ than the entire history (and probable future) of mechanical computation.

Now think about the entire planet as a single animal with ~10^30 (10 octillion) cells and ~10^31 (10 nonillion) viruses.

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I hope we may learn to understand and appreciate the »profound difference between »organisms and »mechanical computation. And to help each other to clarify these perspectives which are fundamental to our nature and the nature of life on Earth.

Organisms generally tend to aid all organisms and the biosphere with every ‘operation’. Machines do precisely the opposite of this. They »require the death of organisms and the biosphere to ‘do computation’ by offloading entropy into a (para-)negentropic living membrane on the surface of the Earth.