Life-speed of non-water alien life (much slower or much faster than on Earth)?

Would non-water based alien life have different life speed than us?

^{(I have studied some chemistry in CPGE in 1978-80, but I was very bad at it)}

IIRC, chemical reactions are (exponentially) faster with temperature, i.e. because of Arrhenius equation.

So hypothetical life form in a lake of methane (e.g. bacteria on Titan) would, IIUC, be much slower than water-life on Earth. But I have no idea how much slower.

Let's suppose there would be bacterial life on Titan, and that we observe it in some optical microscope. Would the living cell appear moving very slowly, or not at all?

A more general form of my question would be related to alien intelligence? Is it conceivable that it would operate at speeds so widely different from ours (e.g. thinking or moving a billion times -or just a few hundred times- slower or faster than us) that we would not notice it?

Have life forms working a billion times faster -or slower- than us (or simply 100x times faster or slower than us) being scientifically imagined? By what plausible mechanism?

More or less "scientific" references and "explanations" (of the tutorial kind), or even science-fiction references (In the 1970s, as a teenager, I have read The Black Cloud) are welcome.

^{PS: notice that artificial intelligence software on current silicon computer is likely, if/when it would exist, to "think" and "live" 10x to 100x faster than us. In a few milliseconds an AI would make some cognitive steps that would take tenths of second to us humans}

posted about 8 years ago

Basile Starynkevitch‭

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