Switching elements on Earth
≈ 100,000,000 : 1
Prokaryotic cells number 4–6 × 10³⁰. Transistors ever manufactured
are usually put near 10²². Biology leads by roughly eight orders of magnitude — and
the silicon figure is the shakier of the two by a wide margin.
The two ladders
Read down. Where a row has no fair counterpart it is left unpaired rather than forced —
a bad pairing costs more credibility than a gap does.
Life
Computing
~10³¹virus particles — outnumber cells, and are not cells
—no counterpart: nothing in computing replicates without a host and is not itself a machine
4–6 × 10³⁰prokaryotic cells — bacteria and archaea
≈ 10²²transistors ever manufactured
≈ 2.5 × 10²³human somatic cells, all people combined
≈ 3.4 × 10¹⁰/yrmicrocontrollers shipped, 2024 — a flow, not a stock
8.2 × 10⁹humans
≈ 7 × 10⁹smartphones in use
8.7 × 10⁶eukaryotic species, ±1.3 million — of which ~86% on land are still undescribed
≈ 3–4 × 10⁸registered businesses worldwide — the nearest thing to a species count, and not very near
—no counterpart: biology has no artefact that exists only while it is being paid for
≈ 10⁷/yrservers shipped; discrete GPUs in the tens of millions
What this table counts
- counts
- Stocks where a stock exists, flows where only a flow is published. The microcontroller and server rows are annual shipments, not installed base — nobody publishes the installed base, and the two differ by roughly the service life.
- excludes
- Eukaryotic cells other than human. Plants dominate the biomass, but a defensible global eukaryotic cell count does not exist, so none is quoted.
- uncertainty
- The cell figure is a 1998 census with published error bars and has held up. The transistor figure has no equivalent — no census exists, and published totals vary by an order of magnitude. Business counts vary by more, depending on what registration means in each jurisdiction.
- the trap
- A transistor and a cell are not comparable units. A transistor switches; a cell metabolises, repairs, replicates and computes. If anything the comparison flatters silicon, because it counts each of biology's processors as a single switch.
The one row that nearly matches
Everything on this page is orders of magnitude apart except one line:
8.2 billion people, and roughly 7 billion smartphones in use. Within a factor of two.
That is the only place in this entire series where the two substrates arrive at the same
number, and it happened in about fifteen years.
The asymmetry is the finding
It is worth sitting with the fact that we know the number of bacteria on Earth better
than we know the number of transistors. One was counted by a deliberate scientific
census with published error bars. The other is inferred from sales.
That asymmetry recurs throughout this series. Biology has been measured by people trying to
establish a fact; computing is mostly measured by people trying to sell something or report
a quarter.
Sources
- Whitman, Coleman & Wiebe, Prokaryotes: the unseen majority, PNAS 1998 — 4–6 × 10³⁰ cells. pnas.org
- Mora et al., How many species are there on Earth? 2011 — 8.7 million ± 1.3 million eukaryotic species; ~86% of land species undescribed. summary
- Microcontroller shipments > 34 billion units in 2024. Market-research figure, not an audited total — weaker than anything on the life side of this table.
- Cumulative transistor production ≈ 10²² is a widely repeated reconstruction rather than a measured total. Treated here as an order of magnitude, not a number. semiconductors.org
- Human cell count ≈ 3 × 10¹³: Bianconi et al., Annals of Human Biology 2013. Multiplied by 8.2 billion people.
- Smartphones in use and registered-business counts are industry and statistical-agency aggregates with wide definitional variation. Order of magnitude only.