A Snail's Perspective

I love looking under the hood of things. Getting into the engine room of life is my chief delight. I would love to hear and see the whirrr of electrons in the backroom of existence. Maybe the thump, thump, thump of a beating heart, too?

When I walked home from the farmers’ market this noon, I noticed something on a buddleia in our neighborhood. There was a teeny, tiny snail, glued to a leaf high above the ground.

Seeing this snail inspired a thought experiment. If the snail was this high above the ground, how tall would that be in human dimensions?

I immediately got to it!

The snail was about 1 cm in diameter. I had found it ca. 1.5 meters above the ground.

So, this snail was about 150 times its own height above the ground.

If an average human is 1.8 meters tall [using the German average here], 150 times their height would be 270 meters.

I googled a height-to-stories-calculator for buildings and found that 270 meters is 81 stories tall.

So, if this snail were a human, this person would have stuck themselves to the 81st floor of a very tall building by virtue of the slimey glands on their belly.

They would have also had to slime-climb their way up there. 81 floors.

Can you imagine?!?

Small moments like these reignite my sense of wonder at life.

It’s so easy to take all this for granted.

Life is an endless journey of discovery, if you let it be.