annyong

I was just wondering what the exact influences are on the scale, and not the size, of living things on Earth. Plants and animals ranging in size from the smallest insect to the largest dinosaur or whale are all still relatively close in size. Why is it that there aren't creatures orders of magnitude larger scale? or smaller scale? On a planet with higher or lower gravity, would the overall scale of life change? Is a mile-wide living creature possible? Or is the scale of life inherently based on the size of the molecules we all start with?

But that is my point exactly... This experiment would take place in total darkness and the laser beam, perpendicular to the camera, would travel through fog or something similar and would appear as a very bright visible line against the dark background. Even at very low exposure times, I would have to believe there would be a laser bright enough to show up, at least as a very faint line against the darkness surrounding it.

I was indeed implying filming perpendicular to the beam so you can see the beam traversing the entire distance, and filming during fog or through some sort of suspended particles, so that you could see the position and length of the beam in mid-air. With a laser beam bright enough in darkness, I would think it would be possible to capture, even with an extremely small exposure time such as a millionth of a second. I have read of cameras capable of 200 million frames per second, with which you could capture around 5 feet of light travel per frame. I think this would be very interesting to see, to actually see a beam of light starting to travel out from it's source. I wonder if anyone has done any experiments with this kind of thing.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, So, per millionth of a second, it travels .186 miles, or 982 feet. There are high speed digital video cameras capable of speeds over 1 million frames per second. If I was to set up a laser on a foggy night and film the beam traveling one mile at 1 million frames per second, it should take 5.37 frames. Does any video like this exist?