The two of them were in agreement about the decision.

The two of them were in accord about the decision. Your cells are amazing biological robots, driven entirely by the fundamental forces of the universe, and yet here they are. They don’t want anything, they don’t feel anything, they are never sad or happy; they just are, right here, right now. They are as conscious as a stone, or a chair, or a neutron star, and just follow their programming that’s been evolving and changing for billions of years, molded by natural selection.

To understand how amazing cells are, you need to dive deep. Inside a cell, there are trillions of grains of sand, billions of grains of rice, hundreds of thousands of grapes, a few thousand apples, and a dozen watermelons. All of this is mostly made up of water molecules, giving the cells insides the consistency of soft jelly and enabling other things to move around easily. Almost all of the other things are proteins, several billion in total, and more than 10,000 different kinds, depending on the function of the cell.

Proteins are made up of amino acids, the alphabet of the language of life. There are 21 different amino acids, like different letters. If you put around 50 amino acids together, they form a protein, which in the language of life is a word. And if you put many of these protein words together, you get a sentence called a biological pathway.

This language of life is so complex that it defies imagination. You need to know about 8,000 words to speak a human language really well, but in the language of life there are an estimated twenty thousand. While the average English word has five letters, human proteins have an average of 375 amino acids, and the longest protein has more than thirty thousand. Cells need to execute thousands of steps at any moment, and if they ever stop speaking the language of Life, they die.

So how do Mindless cells speak a language this complex? There are 6.8 times 10 to the power of 495 possible proteins that your cells can make - a quadrillion Google Google Google times more than there are atoms in the universe. Most of these possible proteins are useless, just like with human language. So you need to know which words, which proteins, make up a language to speak it properly, and this is the job of your DNA, a long sequence of instructions. If you untangle the cell’s DNA, it would be about two meters long. All of your body’s DNA combined into one long string would reach to the Sun and back over 20 times.