Galaxies as Ripples: A Thought Experiment About Lifespans, Perception, and a Giant’s Clock

There's a quiet, unsettling feeling that shows up when you watch a mayfly rise from the water, flutter briefly, and vanish. If your entire adult life lasts roughly a day (or less), then sunrise-to-sunrise isn't "a day" — it's everything. The whole arc of possibility. The whole story.

This post is a speculative theory — not physics, not a proof — built from a mash-up of biology, perception, and cosmic scale. It begins with a simple intuition: smaller lives often feel faster, and larger timescales can swallow meaning the way an ocean swallows a pebble.

Then we push that intuition until it becomes a metaphor big enough to hold galaxies: imagine the universe as a vast ocean, each galaxy a ripple, and some "giant" beyond our scale dropping stones into the cosmic water. What we call billions of years could be, to that giant, a couple of seconds.

First, a grounding: small bodies, quick lives (often…)

The claim "the smaller the life form, the shorter the lifespan" is not a law of nature. Plenty of tiny organisms can surprise you, and some large animals live shorter lives than you'd expect. Still, across many groups, there's a common pattern: small animals tend to run "hotter" — higher metabolism, faster heart rates, quicker turnover — and that often correlates with shorter lifespans.

Examples that make the intuition feel real

• Mayflies: For many species, adulthood is famously brief — often around a day — and the adult stage is largely about reproduction rather than feeding.
• Bacteria: Under ideal lab conditions, E. coli can double roughly every ~20 minutes. (In the wild, it's often much slower, but the "fast clock" is still conceptually striking.)
• Etruscan shrew: One of the smallest mammals by mass, with extreme metabolic demands. Smallness forces speed: constant feeding pressure, rapid physiology, little margin for error.
• Elephants: At the other end, elephants commonly live for many decades, with long childhoods, long memories, and slow generational time.

Even if the pattern isn't universal, it's emotionally persuasive: tiny lives flicker; large lives linger. And that opens the door to the next twist: perception.

Does time “move slower” for small creatures?

In everyday language, we say time "moves faster" or "slower." In physics, time dilation is a real, measurable effect under relativity — but that's not what we mean here.

Here we're talking about subjective time: how many distinct "moments" an organism can process per second. One way scientists study this is via critical flicker fusion frequency (CFF): the rate at which flickering light is perceived as steady. Species that can resolve higher flicker rates are, in a rough sense, sampling the world in finer slices.

Thought experiment: If your brain can register more "frames" per second, then a single second may contain more experienced events — and the outside world can feel comparatively slower.

Humans typically fuse flicker at around ~60 Hz in many contexts, while some flies can resolve far higher rates (often cited in the ~200–250 Hz range). The result is intuitive: swatting a fly feels normal to you; to the fly, your hand can look like a slow-moving wall of doom — giving it extra time (in experience) to dodge.

This doesn't mean flies "live longer" in calendar time. It means their nervous systems may carve time into smaller chunks. Their Now could be more densely packed.

The river ripple: micro-worlds born in motion

Now take a stone and throw it into a river. You get rings, turbulence, tiny whirlpools — a brief reshaping of the local environment. In reality, a ripple doesn't magically create life from nothing. But it can rearrange conditions: oxygen mixing, nutrient stirring, temperature micro-gradients, light shimmer, and shelter pockets.

At the microscopic scale, "a small change" can be a whole new neighborhood. Microbes and plankton live amid flows and films; a swirl can concentrate food, separate predators from prey, or open a temporary niche.

If you imagine countless microorganisms in and around that turbulence, each with rapid reproduction cycles, then the ripple's brief existence might contain — for them — an epic span of births, competitions, adaptations, extinctions, and expansions. The ripple is their era.

Scale it up: the universe as an ocean, galaxies as ripples

Here's the leap: what if the cosmic environment works like that river?

Imagine a "cosmic ocean" — not necessarily literal water, but a deeper medium: a foundational reality whose disturbances appear to us as spacetime, matter, and energy. In that ocean, a galaxy is a ripple pattern: a stable-looking swirl that, on a bigger clock, is temporary and dynamic.

On our scale, galaxies persist for billions of years. On a much larger scale, maybe they are brief surface textures — the way a wave crest looks stable until you zoom out and realize it's a quick event in a much larger sea.

The Giant’s Second

Now add the giant: a being (or process) outside our scale that "drops stones" into the cosmic ocean. The stones could be anything in the metaphor: perturbations, initial conditions, collisions of higher-order structures, shifts in the underlying medium — the causes don't matter as much as the time ratio.

If the giant's actions unfold on a vastly slower or broader timescale, then our entire cosmic history might fit inside a tiny slice of the giant's present. The formation of stars, the rise and fall of civilizations, the drift of continents — a blink in a larger eye.

What would “meaning” look like on that scale?

Here's where the thought experiment gets weirdly personal. If your entire life is a ripple inside someone else's second, then:

• Our "ancient" history could be the first tremor after impact.
• Our present moment could be the crest of a wave.
• Our future could be the fading rings — still dramatic to us, already dissolving to the giant.

But meaning doesn't have to scale. A mayfly's life is short to us, but not to the mayfly. The mayfly's sky is still huge. Its choices still matter inside its world. If our universe is a ripple, our loves and losses are still real to the minds inside the ripple.

What’s “past the giant”?

The moment you imagine a giant, the next question arrives: what contains it? If our galaxies are ripples in a cosmic ocean, then the giant lives in (or is made of) that ocean. So what is the ocean inside of?

Three possibilities (none provable here, all useful as imagination tools):

1) The fractal stack

Reality could be layered: ripples inside ripples, worlds inside worlds. Our "giant" might be a mayfly to an even larger scale. In this view, "up" and "down" the ladder never ends — an infinite nesting of contexts.

2) The boundary you can’t cross

Maybe there is a largest meaningful scale. Past it, the concept of "time" as we understand it stops applying. The giant's realm might not be "more space," but a different category of existence: rules that don't translate into our physics the way 3D rules don't translate into a 2D drawing.

3) The ocean is mind-like

This is the most poetic option: the underlying medium could be informational or experiential — an ocean of patterns where "matter" is how those patterns appear from within. In that case, the giant isn't a creature throwing stones. The "stone drop" is a shift in attention, a change in the informational field, a reconfiguration that generates ripples we interpret as universes.

The humbling conclusion: you are always someone’s “small”

On a human scale, a mayfly is impossibly brief. On a mayfly scale, a day is a universe. On a cosmic scale, a human civilization is a spark. On the giant's scale, a cosmic epoch might be a heartbeat.

The theory doesn't ask you to believe in literal giants. It asks you to feel how radically perspective can change what "Now" means — and how many different clocks might be embedded in reality.

If the universe is a ripple, then we are the ripple learning to notice itself. And whether the giant exists or not, that's still astonishing.