I wrote a blog post a few years ago explaining how molecules get to the right place at the right time. The short answer is that cells are nothing like the nice, peaceful animations. Cells are extremely crowded and things move extremely fast. Glucose molecules, for instance, move around cells at 250 miles per hour and collides with something billions of times a second. An enzyme might collide with a reactant 500,000 times a second. And proteins can spin a million times per second. So as you suspect, by random chance molecules are in the right spot very frequently.
Thank you for writing this. I used to wonder how flies have such terrific reaction times and whip around the air with insane agility. And then I wondered if we are just seeing them in fast forward, due to the relatively slow clock in our heads. I imagined it was why they had such a short lifespan of just several days. And I imagined them seeing us as glacially moving statues—"man this guy hasn't moved in years!"
Reading your description of cells as moving imperceptibly fast only fills me more with this sense—that we are very slow moving giants, waiting on the billions of "years" of inner machinery time to tick us forward ever so slowly.
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.
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.
Thanks for the excellent blog post. This is something more people need to appreciate.
I never realized just how crowded until I saw David Goodsell's molecular illustrations[1] in Drew Barry's TED talk.[2] Goodsell's drawings show the actual density and diversity of molecules inside the cell.
People get confused because they read that cells are ~99% water by molecule count. By weight they're only ~65-70% water. One out of three atoms being part of a non-water molecule means cells are tightly packed.
http://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowde...