Speculative Fact #321: Slow, Slow…Slow Life

As humans we have experiences ranging from the foot and the second to the year and the mile. Other forms of life might have very different subjective experiences of scale.
            Dr. Hans Roy (a geomicrobiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark) and his colleagues have encountered a community of very slow microorganisms at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The pocket has remained untouched for over 80 million years and almost went completely unnoticed.
            These tiny critters are extremely slow – it would take one of them ten years to consume as much oxygen as a human inhales in one breathe. Dr. Roy has said it’s almost like a form of suspended animation.
            What would your perception of time and space be like if you had an extremely slow metabolism or a very long life span? To such organisms, humans could be whizzing by them too fast to speak or even relate to. Our entire human civilization could burn itself out in a few millennia while a slower one trundles along like a tortoise.

-Jonathan Hernandez