Time for you to read "Dragon's Egg", a hard sci-fi book about a civilization that evolves on a time scale far shorter than humans ultimately leading up to interaction with humans and this civilization. Awesome book which explores different time scales.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

Dude, that was awesome. Thanks a lot!

I haven't had a book this good in some weeks. Cheers!

There is supporting evidence for your intuition. See for example:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347213...

thanks for the citation! I converted Table 1 to show timescales using the CFF column:

    European eel                    0.23x
    Leatherback sea turtle          0.25x
    Blacknose shark                 0.30x
    Tokay gecko                     0.33x
    Rainbow trout                   0.45x
    Scalloped hammerhead            0.45x
    Little skate                    0.50x
    Tiger salamander                0.50x
    Harp seal                       0.53x
    Japanese rice fish              0.62x
    Lemon shark                     0.62x
    Brown rat                       0.65x
    Green sea turtle                0.67x
    Loggerhead sea turtle           0.67x
    Great horned owl                0.75x
    Tuatara                         0.75x
    Guinea pig                      0.83x
    Cat                             0.92x
    American red squirrel           1.00x
    Homo sapiens                    1.00x
    Goldfish                        1.12x
    Anolis cristatellus             1.17x
    Short-eared owl                 1.17x
    Budgerigar                      1.23x
    Dog                             1.33x
    Green iguana                    1.33x
    Yellowfin tuna                  1.33x
    Chicken                         1.45x
    Common treeshrew                1.50x
    Rhesus macaque                  1.58x
    Common starling                 1.67x
    Rock dove                       1.67x
    Yellow-pine chipmunk            1.67x
    Golden-mantled ground squirrel  2.00x

I've been having this same thought lately, about the scales of time that exist below/inside what we perceive. I agree that smaller/simpler brains probably run on a higher clock speed than those that are larger or more complex, and that impacts perception. But even within the fastest little minds, the rate at which chemical reactions take place or electrical signals propagate make them seem glacially slow in comparison.

I was actually thinking about putting a little video together about these scales of time, with the video containing nothing more than a person's blink reaction slowed down 5,000x.

I wonder if we allow enough for this in our search for alien life? Are their other life-forms out there somewhere whose timescales are radically different from ours? How would we find or communicate with them if there were?

like forests? I cannot forget the statement in 'Avatar' describing the 'tree of life'. How is it that memories have not been encoded in massively networked aspen forests? Or may they're there and we just havent looked. And with large encoded memory stores, manipulation of that data is what we call conciousness.

Just to clear up a minor (yet undying and continually propagated) fallacy, the lifespan of house flies is actually around 28 days.