#really large numbers

[dduane]

So I was just rereading Dark Mirror and it just amused me that you mention 512 terabyte isolinear chips and we're really not far off that now in hard drive sizes... I just bought an 8 terabyte external for less than 200 bucks.

Life imitating art? Or is Geordi La Forge secretly working in Silicon Valley?

(snicker) Another reminder that it's wiser to make up measurements instead of assuming a Really Big Metric One you invent will be big enough to last until the work goes safely out of print. (As you see, I've already embarrassed myself this way once in a Trek novel. A harsh lesson...)

...But have I learned my lesson? Hmm. I mean, look at this, which goes back to 2009 or so. By quoting a storage size in yottabytes, I just skated by. And I think I may be safe with that for a while longer. But how much longer? Hard to say...

[minddynamite]

Your Brain V. The Universe

Here are some really staggering numbers for your consideration.

There are around 100 billion neurons (brain cells) currently living in your cerebral cortex. These neurons communicate through electrochemical signals that are transported via synapses, which are structures that serve as the gateway to each neuron

If each of these 100 billion neurons only ever established one synaptic connection with one other neuron, the connections in your brain would easily equal the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

However, our neurons make far more connections than that: an average of between 1,000 and 10,000 synapses exist for each cell. In total, this means that the number of connections in your brain is somewhere in the range of 1000 trillion. Researchers have estimated the number of stars in the universe to be between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion, so for the sake of simplicity, we will say that the number of actual connections in the human brain equals about half of the total stars in the universe.

But the truly astonishing part of this comparison is when we examine the total number of potential connections between neurons in the brain. The example used in this article factors only 1 billion, 1/100th of the actual number of neurons in the brain. According to these calculations, the possible connections total to 3 x 10^5,000,000,000, which is far greater a number than the estimated total mass of the entire universe. In short, there are more potential synaptic connections in your brain than the number of atoms in the universe.