Awhile back I was in my yard watching ants crawling along my garden hose and I wondered if I were to shrink down to the size of those kids in the movie how fast would those ants be moving. The ants on my hose were going at least 2 inches per second. That also got me thinking that I’ve also seen ants travel that fast, stop suddenly and go off in a different direction. If I were that small would that be just a blur and…
Second question:
Is there anything comparable to that fast kind of motion in real life. I was kinda thinking of maybe certain amusement park rides
Just because you were smaller wouldn’t mean that the ants would be traveling any faster. If they were traveling 2 inches per second (0.16 feet per second) when you were normal-sized, they would still be traveling 2 inches per second when you were small-sized.
1 yard/sec is a reasonable speed for a walking human and 10 yards/sec is a very fast run. Shrinking yourself to 1/100 the size (still many times larger than an ant) and we get a range about 1/3 to 3 inches/sec. I’d say that for their size, those ants are really motoring. Of course, they have six legs and you only have two!
What I meant was if the scale of measurement changed along with me. If I were as small as the ants and walked 5,280 of my feet in one hour ( and I’m thinking that would be just a small section of my hose ) how fast would they be going at 2 inches per second at my normal height.
If you shrunk 1/100 of your size (from 5’10" to 7/10"), the 2 in/sec that the ant is moving at would appear to you to be 200 in / sec, which is about 11.4 mph. About as fast as a sprinter.
That makes sense. But what if your consciussness sped up in proportion to your shrinkage? The the ants would seem to be moving in a stately elephant-like manner.
I’ve often suspected that the smaller an animal is, the faster it lives. Its heart beats faster, it can move itself faster, its nerve signals don’t have as far to travel, and so on. Compare a chihuahua to a St. Bernard. If you slow down a chihuahua’s bark, it sounds like that of a larger, slower dog. Does the chihuahua experience it that way?
If I shrink down to the size that the kids were in the movie, I’d be smaller than the ant which would be a lot less then 7/10" but, also, the ants wouldn’t be traveling in measurements of inches. They would be traveling the same scale of measurement of my height so that an inch at my normal height might be equal to lets say 60 or 70 feet to my shrunken height or maybe even more. The ants would be moving feet per sec. At least from my perspective.
If you were 7/10" tall, the ants would appear to be moving at 200 in/sec, or 16.7 ft/sec or 11.4mph in your new perspective. 1 inch in real life would appear to be 100 inches (8’4") to the shrunken you.
If you shrunk so small that one real inch now looked like 60 feet, then the 2in/sec ant would appear to move at 120ft/sec, or 82mph.