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Thank you for writing this. I used to wonder how flies have such terrific reaction times and whip around the air with insane agility. And then I wondered if w
by undershirt 9y ago
Thank you for writing this. I used to wonder how flies have such terrific reaction times and whip around the air with insane agility. And then I wondered if we are just seeing them in fast forward, due to the relatively slow clock in our heads. I imagined it was why they had such a short lifespan of just several days. And I imagined them seeing us as glacially moving statues—"man this guy hasn't moved in years!"
Reading your description of cells as moving imperceptibly fast only fills me more with this sense—that we are very slow moving giants, waiting on the billions of "years" of inner machinery time to tick us forward ever so slowly.
- jcims 9y agoI've been having this same thought lately, about the scales of time that exist below/inside what we perceive. I agree that smaller/simpler brains probably run on a higher clock speed than those that are larger or more complex, and that impacts perception. But even within the fastest little minds, the rate at which chemical reactions take place or electrical signals propagate make them seem glacially slow in comparison. I was actually thinking about putting a little video together about these scales of time, with the video containing nothing more than a person's blink reaction slowed down 5,000x.
- zipwitch 9y agoI wonder if we allow enough for this in our search for alien life? Are their other life-forms out there somewhere whose timescales are radically different from ours? How would we find or communicate with them if there were?
- bawana 9y agolike forests? I cannot forget the statement in 'Avatar' describing the 'tree of life'. How is it that memories have not been encoded in massively networked aspen forests? Or may they're there and we just havent looked. And with large encoded memory stores, manipulation of that data is what we call conciousness.
- op00to 9y agoTime for you to read "Dragon's Egg", a hard sci-fi book about a civilization that evolves on a time scale far shorter than humans ultimately leading up to interaction with humans and this civilization. Awesome book which explores different time scales. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
- iUsedToCode 9y agoDude, that was awesome. Thanks a lot! I haven't had a book this good in some weeks. Cheers!
- alphydan 9y agoThere is supporting evidence for your intuition. See for example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347213003060 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347213...
- undershirt 9y agothanks for the citation! I converted Table 1 to show timescales using the CFF column: European eel 0.23x Leatherback sea turtle 0.25x Blacknose shark 0.30x Tokay gecko 0.33x Rainbow trout 0.45x Scalloped hammerhead 0.45x Little skate 0.50x Tiger salamander 0.50x Harp seal 0.53x Japanese rice fish 0.62x Lemon shark 0.62x Brown rat 0.65x Green sea turtle 0.67x Loggerhead sea turtle 0.67x Great horned owl 0.75x Tuatara 0.75x Guinea pig 0.83x Cat 0.92x American red squirrel 1.00x Homo sapiens 1.00x Goldfish 1.12x Anolis cristatellus 1.17x Short-eared owl 1.17x Budgerigar 1.23x Dog 1.33x Green iguana 1.33x Yellowfin tuna 1.33x Chicken 1.45x Common treeshrew 1.50x Rhesus macaque 1.58x Common starling 1.67x Rock dove 1.67x Yellow-pine chipmunk 1.67x Golden-mantled ground squirrel 2.00x
- glenneroo 9y agoJust to clear up a minor (yet undying and continually propagated) fallacy, the lifespan of house flies is actually around 28 days.
- jcims 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCqxOzKNFks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCqxOzKNFks