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Jonathan Langdale originally shared this post:The estimated population of the internet is around 7 billion people. But they're not online at the same time. Assuming a 5% rate of concurrent internet users it could be something like 35 million, but it's probably more.

A human brain has approximately 90 billion neurons transmitting information across 150 trillion connections. Imagine 35 million brains each with 90 billion neurons and 150 trillion connections, connected to each other.

The Fujitsu RIKEN K super computer has 68,544 8-core SPARC64 processors and runs an enhanced Linux-based operating system. This is a total of 548,352 cores. The K computer uses a special six-dimensional torus network interconnect called Tofu. The highest peak power used was 9.89MW (9,890,000W) of power or roughly 10,000 houses. The K computer can perform 8.162 petaflops or 8.162 quadrillion calculations per second.

1 million is 1,000,000
1 billion is 1,000,000,00
1 billion x 1 million is 1,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 quadrillion (10^15).

35 million brains times 90 billion neurons is a total of 3150 quadrillion neurons. By estimating the distance between synapses and how fast nerve impulses travel, we can in turn estimate how many synapse operations per second the brain can do. Using this information, the raw computational power of the human brain might be roughly between 10^13 and 10^16 operations per second, or between 10 to 100 trillion. Each brain would use roughly on average 10W.

35 million brains processing 10 trillion operations per second would be a total parallel processing engine of 350 sextillion (35x10^21), each brain using 10W for a total of 350MW of energy per second.

The K super computer uses .83MW per quadrillion operations. The human super computer uses 1MW per sextillion operations. A human super computer might be more efficient and faster than the fastest super computer by several orders of magnitude.

Not only that, but human nodes each have the ability to process natural language, sight, sound and touch. They also each have the ability to perform the create() function.


Pairs of opposite nodes also have cross-platform sex()functions which leads to new nodes.

(My numbers may be off, this is just a quick estimate)




*An awesome post from the internet.