Why do smaller animals move so quickly? When I watch squirrels, flies, or ants, I’m amazed that they can start and stop moving, change directions, and navigate around obstacles so swiftly. Their wee brains must be operating to a clock that’s significantly faster than that of humans. And conversely, larger animals like elephants, bears, and whales tend to lumber along. We know from physics that bigger things have more momentum and take more effort to move. But if little creatures are faster, then maybe smaller brains are speedier than larger ones. An ant, let’s call him Elmer, has a tiny brain, and it must be fast enough to allow him to move the way he does. As his world zips along, Elmer would see humans as moving quite slowly relative to himself.
Everyone perceives time differently. One second may seem like a short period of time to us, but to Elmer, it may feel longer. How much can you do in one second? How many decisions can you make in that time? Elmer may be making several decisions each second as his brain rapidly negotiates bumps and turns as he scurries over dirt and rocks. Consider an artificially intelligent being, powered by a super-computer that’s capable of making millions of decisions per second. In this case, one second may seem like a very long time.
Let’s get back to our ant. Having traveled ten centimeters, Elmer may have taken one second according to a human observer, but for Elmer, it may have taken ten ant-seconds. So time seemed to have passed more slowly for Elmer than it did for the human. If you think back to when you were young and smaller, didn’t summer vacations feel like epic, long adventures? The passing of one whole year was a big deal. If we zoom in even further, we notice that bacteria multiply within minutes. Zooming out, space appears to be still.
If there exists a being out there that is so large that it sees our galaxy and many others at a scale where they appear like molecules, then I would guess that from its perspective, our movements and even the span of time in which we’ve existed as a species in this universe would seem imperceptibly minuscule. Perhaps after trillions of years, the human species would have spread across several galaxies and reached a point where we would become noticeable to this being and then just get disinfected like an irritating mold. But don’t worry; it would take that being at least another trillion years to find the mold spray and finish us off.
Leave a Reply