Is that realistic? Do ants see us like that?
In: Physics
I used to wonder this as well, until I got to watch a glacier break off into the sea. It moved as slowly as anything on a nature documentary. It’s an issue of scale, and perception. There was really nothing around for me to visually judge how far I was from it, and how fast it was travelling. No landmarks other than “More ice”. It’s a really huge thing, accellerating into the water, but it looks slow because I have no sense of scale. Side note, the MASSIVE splash also looked slow in rising and then falling back into the water because I had nothing to judge it against. Just more water, and a big chunk of ice.
When it comes to living things, and more precisely the muscles of living things, there is something called the square-cube law. The strength of a muscle scales quadratically with size (that’s scaling linearly), whereas the total mass of a body scales cubically.
Now I’m going to do a typical physicist approximation and say that a human is a cube with dimensions x*y*z, and he has some abstract measure of strength S. Then we will scale his dimensions linearly by 2 – making him a cube of 2x*2y*2z. We can see that his total volume (and thus his total mass) is increased by a factor of 8. At the same time, his strength now is 4S, an increase by a factor of only 4.
So as you can see, as living things get bigger and bigger, yes, they get stronger in an absolute sense but they get weaker and weaker in relation to their own bodies. That’s why tiny things like insects can carry objects 100x their own weight (ants), jump distances a hundred times longer than their body length (grasshoppers), change directions super quickly (flies) and in general their movements (and especially those of their limbs) are incredibly quick and hard to follow for us – it’s simply very easy for them to overcome the momentum of their own bodies. At the same time, you have massive animals like elephants that move sluggishly and can’t jump at all. The square-cube law is also why you don’t see any animals past a certain size outside of water (water helps them support their weight) nor animals past a certain size that can fly (at some point the wing muscles are just too weak).
To summarise: giant things in movies seem like they move in slow motion because they _are_ moving more slowly than us if you measure movement relative to their own body size. Their muscles are too weak to overcome their massive inertias any more quickly than that. In reality, Godzilla and King Kong wouldn’t really be able to even stand, much less walk or fight.
I’m not sure how much the scaling applies to non-biological things (giant robots for example), but I’m pretty certain it’s similar.
If you want to see what it looks like when giant things move at the pace you and I move, watch Godzilla x Kong. Truly weightless action sequences due to exactly what you’re asking.
When things get bigger, they get heavier. But *also* they have more mass far away from the center. So even if a creature is stronger because it’s so big, it takes extra power to rotate one of its limbs around. So that ends up looking slow. That’s why small rodents can scurry but, say, an elephant lopes along.
This specifically has to do with something called moment of inertia, which is resistance to spinning (that is, torque, which causes angular acceleration) in the same way that mass is resistance to moving (that is, force, which causes linear acceleration). Resistance to torque increases much faster than mass. If you double somethings size in all dimensions (width, depth, and height), the mass goes up by eight, but the moment of inertia goes up by 32.
So unless the muscles in your large creature also get stronger on a pound-for-pound basis, it’s going to take longer to just take a step.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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