But if nature was forced to use the pipes-and-ion-channels approach, that leaves us with plenty of scope for speeding things up using silicon and copper (and this is quite apart from all the other more exotic computing substrates that are now on the horizon). If we were simply to make a transition membrane depolarization waves to silicon and copper, and if this produced a 1,000x speedup (a conservative estimate, given the intrinsic difference between the two forms of signalling), this would be an explosion worthy of the name.