Life of “Fly”
Think of a car on a highway. A careful driver would usual hold the speed limit which should be around 65 mph. However, if there was a road block that caused some traffic, the speed at which the car is moving might drop to, say, 20 mph. Picture it. The traffic and the car moving slowly. It’s easy for us to imagine this, because we’ve observed it. However, it’s not that easy to picture changes in time.
Through years of observation humans are wired to think of time as some thing that flows at a constant rate at a pace programmed into our brains. Now even if we imagine time flowing at a different pace than the one we know and love (for example, think of children acting out something in slow motion), we also automatically tie our speed of thought processing to that same time flow rate (we assume that we when moving slower in time, we also think slower).
This may be true. However, for this narrative, let’s assume that thought processing speed is independent of time flow rate and holds constant across any time reference frame (like the speed-of-light). Now let’s also assume (cause assumptions are fun!) that flies can think like humans within the fly time-scale and glaciers can think like humans within the glacier time-scale. If we use a single frame of reference this would essentially mean that the “clock-speed” of the fly is much faster than the human and, likewise the clock-speed of a human is much faster than that of a glacier (see here for an idea on clock-speeds). This story is does not have glaciers in it. It’s a story about Fly the fly.
Some helpful metrics
The mean life time of a house fly = 28 days (not 1 day as mostly thought)The mean life time of a human = 75 years (~27394 days)A fly-second = Feels like a 1 s to a fly, feels like 0.001 s to the reader (*)A fly-minute = Feels like a 1 min to a fly, feels like 0.06 s to the reader (*)A fly-hour = Feels like a 1 hour to a fly, feels like 3.6 s to the reader (*)A fly-day = Feels like a 1 day to a fly, feels like 86.4 s (~1.5 mins) to the reader (*)A fly-year = Feels like a 1 year to a fly, feels like 31536 s (~8.76 h) to the reader (*)(*) - assuming the reader is human
He evaded capture for 27 fly-days. The giant red mesh appeared 7 times within those 27 fly-days. Each time, he saw it in the horizon, slowly approaching to inevitably land on to the spot that he occupied only about 4 fly-minutes ago. It took him a while to drag himself out of there but in each case he had survived.
Life, in-between the giant mesh appearances, was quite good. He enjoyed the days in the air looking for some sweet-smelling snacks to land on. Every so often, his search was rewarded by a food packs of different shapes, sizes and tastes. He reveled in the enjoyment of his senses.
As he looked out, in all directions he could constantly see the giant red mesh approaching, slowly but with consistency. The giant red mesh was affixed to a long extension which in turn was affixed to a large colored mass and that moved slowly about. He watched it as he flew about. He remembered only a few fly-days ago, how he had found a tasty mountain of jello on a large expanse of empty land in the northern-white. The deliciousness had seized his sense of taste like a frog’s tongue and had rendered him almost devoid of any other sense. The giant red mesh had got real close that time as he spend a few fly-minutes taking some good swallows before launching off into his pre-planned exit strategy.
This time was different.
The giant red mesh had appeared from directly behind him. The one place that, in his ample periphery, was not crystal clear. He noticed it…but too late. He had one fly-minute, sixty fly-seconds, before impact. Not enough to drag himself out. He knew it was over. As his doomed-to-fail exit strategy kicked in, his life played out slowly in his mind. He remembered fond memories of picnics in the dump with his family, the delicious jello on the northern-white, and his life in the giant cube universe with its safe upper edges. The giant mesh slowly closed in. He breathed his last.
