For anyone interested in the scientific basis of the concept of computers that emulate human minds that is so central to the story in Newton’s Ark, this article might be interesting.

The lede is that a computer has simulated 1% of the human mind. But for me the takeaway is the following quote (emphasis mine):

“If peta-scale computers like the K computer are capable of representing 1% of the network of a human brain today, then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exa-scale computers hopefully available within the next decade.”

In the Newton’s Ark timeline, Emulated Minds first appear somewhere in the mid-2020s.