Life in Different Scales of Size and Time
A time-lapse video of plants growing, found on Twitter, triggered some intriguing ideas.
I’ve always felt that it is possible that other forms of life — perhaps orders of magnitude larger or smaller than mankind — could live, think, act, interact on different time scales than us and hence not be recognized by us as either alive or sentient or intelligent. And I’ve wondered if time-lapse photography or its opposite (perhaps extended by computer simulation) could reveal that.
That’s a bit like The Overstory by Richard Powers, which is told from the perspective of sentient trees, hundreds of years old. (See my review of that book here.) It also makes me think of Dragon’s Egg by Robert Forward in which intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seeds live at a pace a million times faster than humans. (See Wikipedia’s description of that here.)
