Is that realistic? Do ants see us like that?
In: Physics
Lots of folks missing the point I think you are making. A good example might be the antman movies, whenever he goes giant, for some reason they think it looks cooler to make his movements slow, plodding, and laborious. Which is a subjective choice and some might like it… But I personally think it looks ridiculous and there is *no* reason that it must be this way. Look at the neon Genesis evangelion movies as a counter example. They have similar scaled humanoid giants moving around and they give them a frightening sense of speed and scale not to mention *weight* without needing to rely of slow plodding movements.
This is 100% a choice that the folks making the media are making. And to me, it looks WAY better and more impactful for a giant to run around quickly as if you or I were running amok in a model train convention. (Don’t do this, those old guys are stronger than they look and take their miniatures seriously)
It’s the cube-square law. Take Aeroplanes for an example. If you double their length in each dimension they are 2x2x2 larger and heavier and more power. The speed is determined by when the engine power is equal to air resistance, air resistance is given by cross-section times Velocity²(P=AV²). So power is 2³ times more, but cross-section is 2² so Velocity²=2 or Speed is only root 2 or only 1.41 instead of being twice as fast.
So if a plane is twice in length it is 8 times bigger but would only travel 1.41 times as fast.
Or if you want to go twice as fast you would need to be 4 times in length or 64 times larger.
I’m sure your question is already well answered, but I saw this question before and was also intrigued. One of the top comments put it like this: let’s say it takes you one second to take a 1-foot step. Now scale that by 100. It’ll take 100 seconds to take a 100-foot step. That helped it make sense in my head.
The speed of sound is sort of a universal limit on things moving on Earth. The bigger something is, the more constrained it is by the sound speed limit.
They account both weight and size, they think we move very fast. But large creatures move like we move.
no one commented about this aspect. Nerves only transmit at a certain speed, thus the longer the nerve the slower the response. So yes ant very likely would see us that way(they have terrible eyesight).
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/100629-science-dinosaurs-t-rex-nerves-elephants#:~:text=The%20mighty%20Tyrannosaurus%20rex%20was,(Related%3A%20%22T.
My guess is we have a perception of how fast things relative to their size should be able to move. Someone above gave the example of Godzilla. If you were to resize a human to that size, we’d go a lot faster than Godzilla would. And hence, for its size, Godzilla is probably slow.
For Ants, they’re pretty fast compared to their size. If we were that size, they’d leave us behind to be eaten.
It’s just due to scale, all things fall at the same rate.
If a 1m object starts falling, after one second it will be going 9.8 m/s or almost 10 times its own length every second.
If a 100m object starts falling, after one second it will also be going 9.8 m/s, but only 1/10th of its own length every second.
When the camera zooms out to show the whole thing in frame, we only see it moving very slowly.
Imagine a fly and a person both moving at normal walking speed, the fly traverses its own width100 times in a second, you can barely perceive it being in a single place, so much so that it’s almost impossible to see it at all. but the person traverses its own width maybe 2-3 times a second, if you look at them, likely they are going to be roughly the same place after a second.
In Attack On Titan some Titans move one foot in front of the other in a similar “time”, say 1-2 steps per second while walking, however since they are giant their speed is greater as it’s proportional to their size. Additionally, they are able to run (see video) which means they can be blisteringly quick. I think it’s wrong to say that a giant person views us as “ants” and they move super slow. Are they dumb? Is their brain any worse at processing visual information than us? If a giant creature or person can only move slowly, it must be because it’s so large that its’ muscles can’t even produce enough energy to move the creature as fast as a similar creature of normal size. But assuming the creature or person does have the energy, the muscle, and the visual processing just like a normal size variant, then you would expect it to move just like it does if it were smaller, like a person walking 1-2 steps per second, as would a giant person.
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