If Every Second Lasted an Hour, This is What Things Would Look Like

What if every second lasted one hour instead? What would our world look like? Thanks to the powerful technology of ultra-high-speed cameras, here’s a fascinating video that shows exactly what things would look like.

The Slow Mo Guys, who have a whopping 14+ million subscribers on YouTube, ordinarily shoot their slow-motion videos at 1,000 frames per second and then play back the footage at 25 frames per second. If you do the math, that means each real-world second captured by the camera turns into 40 seconds of slow-motion footage.

For this experiment, however, The Slow Mo Guys used the insanely fast (and insanely expensive) Phantom TMX 7510 high-speed camera to capture moments at a whopping 90,000 frames per second.

If you divide 90,000 by 25, you get 3,600 seconds, or 60 minutes, or 1 hour. That means every real-world second captured at this frame rate produces one hour of video when played back at 25fps.

“At this speed, a minute would last two-and-a-half days,” Gavin Free says. “An hour would last five months. And a day would come in at just under a decade, at nine years and ten months. […] A month would last around three centuries, and a year would be about 3,597 years.”

In the video above, we see a number of shots in “ordinary” slow-motion at first before they’re slowed down to 1-second-to-1-hour slow motion — things like watch splashing or falling, a guy falling into a swimming pool, a match being lit, a water balloon being popped.

“Does anyone else get slightly filled with dread imagining how bad it would be to be stuck at this speed,” the Slow Mo Guys write. “Even if you were surrounded by people you wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone. It would be so lonely.

“It would take you so long to move anywhere. You wouldn’t be able to let anyone know what was happening to you. To them you’d be moving at normal speed but acting strangely…”

You can find more of The Slow Mo Guys’ slow-motion videos on their YouTube channel.