this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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[–] survirtual@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago

This reminds me of the spike in cellular biophoton emissions during mitosis.

Biophoton emissions, basically a faint glow of light emitted by living cells due to metabolic processes, increase sharply at the moment a cell replicates into two cells. It appears as a flash if observing these emissions.

There is a lot to learn about our ideal society by observing our biological processes. The human body is a good example of a functioning mass-scale social substrate. The representative sample that guides the body is billions of neurons. Considering a human body has around 37 trillion cells, and roughly 170 billion brain cells (86 billion neurons + 85 billion non-neural brain cells), that gives us around a 200:1 representative sample. For every 200 cells, there is 1 representative.

Fascinating, isn't it? Dunbar's number states humans can only keep track of a limited number of relationships. That number is a cognitive limit of around 150 stable relationships that we can keep track of. The limit's range has been stretched to 100 - 250 stable relationships.

In other words...the ratio of brain cells to other cells is nearly the same as Dunbar's number. It is reasonable to conclude, then, for a functioning society (because human bodies are far more functional than our planetary society), we need to have a ratio limit on representation. That limit is 200:1. For every 200 people, we need 1 representative.

For the US, for example, with 347 million people, a stable government would need 1.7 million representatives. Sounds crazy, doesn't it, compared to the ass backwards mechanism at play now? But think about it for a bit, and you will find why it is so stable.

That is too many people for an elite to control. It is too many to be corrupted. It adds redundancy. It adds direct accountability, each rep would have a personal relationship with their people, because it is within the Dunbar limit of what they can keep track of.

Something to think about.