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I found the average top speed of a snail to be 0.05 km/h. That’s 1.2km a day, and 438km a year. Even if you were on the other side of the earth the snail would likely be there in about 40-45 years depending on the properties of it’s path.
Imagine starting in L.A. being 20 years old. You could move to Madagascar and live your life until you’re 60, then move back to L.A. and retire there without seeing the snail once
The best twist on this is always “it’s a random snail taken from the currently living population, somewhere”. Everyone has an elaborate anti-snail plan until you don’t know which snail it is
If it’s not a genius snail, how does it know how to get on the right plane or cargo ship to climb on to get to you? It’s either super-genius or has super-heroic strength to swim the ocean. I’m going with genius.
'Elaborate.' Not really. Doesn't matter which snail it is if your plans are solid.
Snail's immortal, not invulnerable. Live in the middle of the Bonneville salt flats for 5-10 years. Snail will dehydrate to the point of immobility within a day. It may survive the experience, but it's not going to traverse such an inhospitable environment at anything like full speed. Change salt flats every decade or so. Then leave the planet when extraterrestrial colonies are a thing.
Only issue is that the upside has to sufficiently provide for the planning.
Unbeknownst to you, when leaving earth and all its accursed snails behind, you didn't realize that a kid had found a snail outside and decided to bring it as a last memento of earth.
You're not even aware when the snail finally gets you. A thousand years of living in the midst desolate places on earth, culminating in your eventual decision to leave humanity behind in its entirety, much like you had left your own humanity behind hundreds of years ago. It all comes to an end when you close your eyes and doze off, relaxing for the fist time in your entire life. Sure that you're safe from any snails ever again.
Anticlimactic.
It‘s peoples‘ entire jobs to do stuff like that, but there‘s always a spot that‘s missed. Ventilation? Snail will get in. Leave a door open for just a bit too long? Snail‘s in. Window‘s open? Okay, now you need a storm screen. Hope it doesn‘t get a hole in it. It‘s just not entirely feasible as long as you want to live in what could be considered a „house“.
In fact, no matter if the snail is any random one or can walk on water to reach you beyond seas, I’ve never in my entire life been surprised by a snail, even tho I’ve had a garden with a lot of them. So it should be fine.
Step 1: Systematically eradicate the snail population globally.
Step 2: Put out an expensive bounty on anyone spotting a snail anywhere on Earth, and then subsequently following it wherever it goes
Step 3: Once you've located the snail, assign 16 watchers to watch the snail at all hours on a rotating schedule. It's location is updated by GPS to the cloud.
Step 4: Use the snails cloud GPS data to build a mobile app. If you take a picture of the snail and ping its location, you get $1 and you get exclusive emojis
Step 5: The snails exact location is understood at all times. Further scientific inquiry can now be conducted on the snail
Step 6: With the success of the advertising campaign on the snail picture mobile app, you re-invest that wealth into scientists whose sole purpose is to understand the snail in a mobile laboratory, meant to follow the snail at all costs
Step 7: Invest that money into longevity science
Step 8: Become a trillionaire
Step 9: Amass the remainder of the world's wealth. Utilize it as well as your vast resources to study space travel. Launch a mobile snail defense satellite.
(Optional Step): Also just send the snail into space, but sometimes the scenario doesn't allow that
(Optional Step): Monopolize the diamond market, as well as the diamond saws niche market. Better safe than sorry, better make it illegal to make anything that can cut through titanium
Step 10: Build a snail containment apparatus aboard the mobile snail defense satellite, utilizing a zero gravity titanium hollow sphere in which is enclosed the snail
Step 11: Utilize the mobile defense platform you've built using your wealth, develop a containment protocol, utilizing everything you know about the snail to your advantage
Step 12: Secure the snail in a zero gravity titanium sphere environment. In this way, the zero gravity nature means the titanium sphere will just continuously bounce against the side of the satellite. The snail will never really get any closer but it continues to have the opportunity to try
Step 13: As humanity is preparing to be engulfed by the sun as it expands, assuming they make it that long, you break open the titanium sphere with a diamond saw from the vault and embrace, ending what surely must have been, the greatest life ever lived or could have been lived. You die with the knowledge that you did your best and you can finally die happy.
>You could move to Madagascar and live your life until you’re 60, then move back to L.A. and retire there without seeing the snail once
Unless the snail doesn't constantly chase you. Maybe it waits in LA for you to return. Then, dead.
Or just pay someone a one time fee to catch the snail and cast it in a block of concrete or something. It may be immortal, but it won't be able to catch you if it can't move.
It feels like this is kinda against the spirit of the challenge. If the snail is omniscient and can plan ahead as well, at some point, it stops being a fun thought experiment. It's like playing as kids as someone uses an "everything-proof shield". It just removes all creativity.
"The snail is going to kill you."
Okay, cool.
Just to point out the obvious, the original scenario already grants the snail knowledge it could not possess: It's hunting you down wherever you go, so somehow it always knows where you are. I don't see how granting the snail the ability to also know where you plan to travel ruins the thought experiment. I think it makes it more complex, and therefore more enjoyable to consider.
I think it still turns it into an „everything-shield“. The snail knowing where you plan to go completely removes any tactics you could use to throw off the snail. You can‘t just think to go one place then purposefully go to another since it‘d already know.
The whole idea of the scenario is the snail always knows where you are. You couldn't "throw off" the snail regardless. The only thing my suggestion does is make it more complicated for the human to win. It removes the boringly simple tactics. Instead of a simple "fly halfway around the world then fly back" solution, now you have to plan each step, not just considering distance from your last stop, but also distance from where you started. The snail isn't guaranteed a "win", it simply gets a fighting chance.
You could always just pour molten steel on the snail and encase it in an inescapable tomb. Game over.
I don't think part of it was not knowing where it was in the beginning. Didn't one of the famous answers have something to do with getting someone else to place it in some container, cover it in concrete, do a whole bunch of other stuff before dropping it in the ocean?
Yeah, the fact that it's chasing you implies that the snail has some amount of intelligence greater than the average snail. The solution to the problem depends heavily on just how much smarter. If it just becomes smart enough to know who you are and want to touch you, there are plenty of easy solutions. If your snail is a reincarnation of Moriarty, you'll probably die.
In all variations I've seen, the snail knows where you are at all times and wants to touch you. It varies if it's otherwise a normal snail or a super intelligent snail
The snail would have to follow the topography of the bottom of the ocean. Just going down and then back up the edges of the Mariana Trench would take a decade or three. Crossing the Himalayas would take several years.
The snail would have to follow the topography of the bottom of the ocean. Just going down and then back up the edges of the Mariana Trench would take a decade or three. Crossing the Himalayas would take several years.
I've also heard one of the conditions being thst the snail is hyperintelligent. It may just wait until you come back or find its way onto a boat or plane
Wouldn’t you have to factor in the speed of the snail in water? I’m assuming this is a land snail and even though it won’t die from the salt or drowning, wouldn’t it significantly increase the time? That is assuming that the land snail is able to get any kind of progress at all. 🐌
Can the snail travel across large bodies of water? If not - and assuming you can know, at some point, where the snail is - this seems solvable without math.
Yeah that’s assumed, it’s immortal so it’ll crawl along the bottom of the ocean (I know that technically adds significant distance but for sake of the word problem will assume a straight line instead of the multi mile peaks and valleys lol)
I mean it depends on the amount of money. If it’s a billion sure no problem. If it’s a million? Idk how much of that are you going to have to spend to get someone to pick it up and ship it off into space lol
Just pay your friend a few bucks to drop it in a sturdy box, or if you’re feeling fancy get a safe, then throw it in the ocean. The snail won’t escape before you die
Millions should be technically enough to send it to space considering spacex's price is 1200USD/pound. Of course they probably wouldn't let you send a random snail to space without a really good reason.
Two people posted very different results, so here's a third take. The sticking point seems to be how fast a snail is. A google search gave me multiple results. I'm going to use this [1 meter per hour](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-23803958).
That's also a convenient number for the math. 1 meter per hour = 24 meters a day, 8760 meters a year, 8.76 km a year.
Circumference of the earth is about 40,000km, so half that if you go to the opposite side of the earth, 20,000 km.
Divide by 8.76 km/year to get 2,283 years.
For an 80 year limit, the snail can go a little over 700 kilometers, 435 miles. For a sense of scale, California is 1040 miles long North/South. If it started in Northern California, you could hang out in Southern California for 160+ years.
So now you have 3 widely different answers. LOL. Again, the difference is the speed of the snail, the math is the same.
I own a lot of snails. They cover a lot more ground than 1 meter per hour.
My tank is about 2 meters across, and after adding food it takes about 10 minutes for every snail to congregate to it.
One more time, with a different speed,
[https://escargot-world.com/how-fast-do-snails-move/](https://escargot-world.com/how-fast-do-snails-move/)
31cm in 2 minutes 13 seconds, which equals 31cm/2.217min, 13.98cm/min, .1398m/min, .0001398km/min, .0084km/hr.
.0084km/hr = .201 km/day, 73 km/year, which makes 5,880 km in 80 years. This is greater than the length of the continental US.
My first post's number is a snail's typical traveling speed, and my second is a Guinness record for fastest snail.
So I've now landed on both sides of u/beardyramen. u/ASKlex's number seems very high, but that is the number Google gives you. I just haven't found a source/methodoly for google's number.
Great answers here, but I think the biggest problem of this question is that you don’t know the initial location of the snail.
Snail might start at India slowly snailing towards LA where you are at. You decide to move to Europe after couple of years and apparently the snail was passing by Europe at that time, meaning you will be screwed soon when you could’ve been safe for another 50 years if you just stayed in LA.
Or the opposite. You both start at the same location. You could’ve just moved to the other side of the planet and live 100+years without thinking about it but instead you die instantly.
So I guess the best strategy would be to stay alerted for years until you are able to locate the snail. And once you do you move to the other side of the planet.
If the snail is invisible.. welp pray to the snail god.
Best play is to hole up for as many years as you can tolerate, always on guard and living a snail proof lifestyle.
When you can't take it anymore, you move to the opposite side of the globe. If the snail was chasing you before, you should have however many years you hoped up for (at least) before he gets to your new location.
Repeat for rest of life.
Half true since earth is a 2D plane.
If the snail was up north from you and if you moved say to the west, the snail would still move closer to you.
So what you really need to do is when you locate the snail, check where it came from and move to the opposite direction as well
The earth is a globe, so moving to the opposite side of the earth and back should mean that the shortest path to you each way is the same but opposite directions. Obv not exactly the same as the earth isn't a perfect sphere but that's negligible. Just move a few days early or something
Also other actors. Like a child seeing a nice looking snail before going on a trip, gets a box and takes it with them. When they get home snail escapes but is now thousand kilometres closer than before. Or birds seeing a snack and picking it up.
I mean, you can pretty easily get it into a jar if you do come across it. Either you put it in there or find someone to help.
Alternatively, you can put like salt circles on your property and be pretty safe from both demons, slugs, and immortal snails.
The answer to this varies a great depending on:
-Whether you know which snail it is
-Whether you know where it's starting from
-Whether the snail is mindlessly crawling toward wherever you happen to be, or intelligent enough to do things like use mass transit or a boat, or super-intelligent and capable of complex planning.
It stops being a simple math problem in those latter cases.
If the snail has the attributes of a snail, then I don't know how you wouldn't be perfectly safe by just crossing one major ocean. Given the volatile nature of the sea, waves, storms, etc there is no way that thing is going to make it to you.
Disclaimer: i don't do imperial, it is immoral.
Since earth is a sphere, if you travel too long along a direction you get back to the starting position. (Unless you are a flat earther)
The maximum distance between two points on earth is just about 18'000km (half the circumference).
According to google, a snail moves at most at 4.8m/h. .
80 years is (in hours) 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 80years: is 700'800hours
4.8m/h * 700'800h is just shy of 3'500km.
As long as you don"t walk towards it you can even stay in the same continent no problem.
> if you travel too long along a direction you get back to the starting position. (Unless you are a flat earther)
You'll get back to your starting position even if you are a flat earther, you'll just deny, deflect, and claim you're the victim of some conspiracy by Big Sphere.
Ah, but they can't because of the Antarctic treaty which means that nobody is allowed to go to Antarctica and there is a MASSIVE navy protecting the waters to make sure nobody goes there. This navy dwarfs the US Navy butt nobody has ever heard or seen any of it.
(Yes they believe that and I'm making fun of that)
A quick Google search found the following entry: “Many snails move at a speed of less than 3 inches (8 centimeters) per minute. This means that if a snail did not stop to rest or eat, it could travel 16 feet (4.8 meters) per hour.” I’ve based my math off the above.
That equates to 384 ft per day, 26.54 miles per year. The shortest route from the West coast to the East coast is 2400 miles. So the snail would reach you in 90.4 years.
Yo. I would want to know where the snail was at all times. So put it in a really strong container and then put the container in a safe place. Such as a safe that you then bury and check on it once in awhile.
That's the real way practical and most safe way to deal with "you get X but immortal snail that kills you on contact...."
Something I’m not sure has been mentioned when I’ve seen that snail question is… do we get to know where the snail starts from? And is it allowed to board airplanes, trains, etc?
If you know which snail it is, you're better off just locking it in a freezer (make sure someone else performs that task). It may not die, but it won't be able to move, let alone escape as long as the freezer is functional.
If you don't know which snail it is (and no way of identifying it either), your best bet is to live on a plane or offworld. In the event of a plane, be sure to pay someone to lay a bunch of salt on the tarmac before landing. Annoying maybe, but if you were able to make any wish, surely you thought this through and made sure this was basically part of the deal to begin with (either outright, or simply because you have obscene amounts of money so you can pay ppl to do it for you).
This is ofc assuming that the snail has some form of intelligence that allows it to 1) identify you, 2) have an unquenching desire/urge to seek you out and 3) be able locate you wherever you are. If even 1 of those criteria is not met, you can simply fool it or live your life knowing that the odds are heavily stacked in your favor.
The sail is death. It's coming for us all, but if u stop to worry about it and just live your life, u will be fine, but yah your going to die aka no matter what that snail is getting you.
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I found the average top speed of a snail to be 0.05 km/h. That’s 1.2km a day, and 438km a year. Even if you were on the other side of the earth the snail would likely be there in about 40-45 years depending on the properties of it’s path. Imagine starting in L.A. being 20 years old. You could move to Madagascar and live your life until you’re 60, then move back to L.A. and retire there without seeing the snail once
Wow, I was definitely expecting like 100+, that checks out though. Thank you!
Imagine the bummer when you realize the snail starts at Madagascar and you would be safer in L.A.
The best twist on this is always “it’s a random snail taken from the currently living population, somewhere”. Everyone has an elaborate anti-snail plan until you don’t know which snail it is
I love this.
Spend 6 months of the year in one place and then 6 months in another. Snail just spends its time retracing its path.
Snail gets to one spot and then just waits for you to come back.
The question states that it moves towards you, not that it has intelligence or tactical planning abilities that easily outperforms a normal snail.
Ok I see. All the versions I've read before grant the snail some kind of hyper intelligence, which is where I was coming from.
I‘ve never read one that makes the snail more intelligent.
Oh yeah I heard those too.
If it’s not a genius snail, how does it know how to get on the right plane or cargo ship to climb on to get to you? It’s either super-genius or has super-heroic strength to swim the ocean. I’m going with genius.
'Elaborate.' Not really. Doesn't matter which snail it is if your plans are solid. Snail's immortal, not invulnerable. Live in the middle of the Bonneville salt flats for 5-10 years. Snail will dehydrate to the point of immobility within a day. It may survive the experience, but it's not going to traverse such an inhospitable environment at anything like full speed. Change salt flats every decade or so. Then leave the planet when extraterrestrial colonies are a thing. Only issue is that the upside has to sufficiently provide for the planning.
Unbeknownst to you, when leaving earth and all its accursed snails behind, you didn't realize that a kid had found a snail outside and decided to bring it as a last memento of earth. You're not even aware when the snail finally gets you. A thousand years of living in the midst desolate places on earth, culminating in your eventual decision to leave humanity behind in its entirety, much like you had left your own humanity behind hundreds of years ago. It all comes to an end when you close your eyes and doze off, relaxing for the fist time in your entire life. Sure that you're safe from any snails ever again. Anticlimactic.
Best plan: move to the furthest reaches of siberia for a good 20-30 years, then move wherever you want as long as it's south of the equator
Honestly can’t you just snail-proof your house and your car?
Do you realize how difficult that actually is?
With the amount of money offered, it’d be pretty easy. And if that’s too hard for you, hire someone to do it for you.
It‘s peoples‘ entire jobs to do stuff like that, but there‘s always a spot that‘s missed. Ventilation? Snail will get in. Leave a door open for just a bit too long? Snail‘s in. Window‘s open? Okay, now you need a storm screen. Hope it doesn‘t get a hole in it. It‘s just not entirely feasible as long as you want to live in what could be considered a „house“.
You need a SNAIL-SIZED hole for them to get in. Honestly nothing that AC and storm-proofing can’t solve.
Snails are tiny, man.
They’re about the size of a hand. So a simple screen should be fine for windows (but don’t risk it chewing through, so just use AC).
Are there snails in the desert or arctic?
And that’s why you just sleep in a pile of salt
In fact, no matter if the snail is any random one or can walk on water to reach you beyond seas, I’ve never in my entire life been surprised by a snail, even tho I’ve had a garden with a lot of them. So it should be fine.
Head for Antarctica.
Just live in a house surrounded by an inexhaustible amount of salt. The snail won't die, but won't move either
Step 1: Systematically eradicate the snail population globally. Step 2: Put out an expensive bounty on anyone spotting a snail anywhere on Earth, and then subsequently following it wherever it goes Step 3: Once you've located the snail, assign 16 watchers to watch the snail at all hours on a rotating schedule. It's location is updated by GPS to the cloud. Step 4: Use the snails cloud GPS data to build a mobile app. If you take a picture of the snail and ping its location, you get $1 and you get exclusive emojis Step 5: The snails exact location is understood at all times. Further scientific inquiry can now be conducted on the snail Step 6: With the success of the advertising campaign on the snail picture mobile app, you re-invest that wealth into scientists whose sole purpose is to understand the snail in a mobile laboratory, meant to follow the snail at all costs Step 7: Invest that money into longevity science Step 8: Become a trillionaire Step 9: Amass the remainder of the world's wealth. Utilize it as well as your vast resources to study space travel. Launch a mobile snail defense satellite. (Optional Step): Also just send the snail into space, but sometimes the scenario doesn't allow that (Optional Step): Monopolize the diamond market, as well as the diamond saws niche market. Better safe than sorry, better make it illegal to make anything that can cut through titanium Step 10: Build a snail containment apparatus aboard the mobile snail defense satellite, utilizing a zero gravity titanium hollow sphere in which is enclosed the snail Step 11: Utilize the mobile defense platform you've built using your wealth, develop a containment protocol, utilizing everything you know about the snail to your advantage Step 12: Secure the snail in a zero gravity titanium sphere environment. In this way, the zero gravity nature means the titanium sphere will just continuously bounce against the side of the satellite. The snail will never really get any closer but it continues to have the opportunity to try Step 13: As humanity is preparing to be engulfed by the sun as it expands, assuming they make it that long, you break open the titanium sphere with a diamond saw from the vault and embrace, ending what surely must have been, the greatest life ever lived or could have been lived. You die with the knowledge that you did your best and you can finally die happy.
>You could move to Madagascar and live your life until you’re 60, then move back to L.A. and retire there without seeing the snail once Unless the snail doesn't constantly chase you. Maybe it waits in LA for you to return. Then, dead.
Unless the "x" that I get is *money*, in which case I hire someone to keep an eye on the snail for me and keep me posted of his whereabouts.
Or just pay someone a one time fee to catch the snail and cast it in a block of concrete or something. It may be immortal, but it won't be able to catch you if it can't move.
It feels like this is kinda against the spirit of the challenge. If the snail is omniscient and can plan ahead as well, at some point, it stops being a fun thought experiment. It's like playing as kids as someone uses an "everything-proof shield". It just removes all creativity. "The snail is going to kill you." Okay, cool.
I think that's a bit melodramatic. Granting the snail intelligence doesn't break the thought experiment, it merely adds another layer to consider.
Knowing your plans in advance isn't just "intelligence" though.
Just to point out the obvious, the original scenario already grants the snail knowledge it could not possess: It's hunting you down wherever you go, so somehow it always knows where you are. I don't see how granting the snail the ability to also know where you plan to travel ruins the thought experiment. I think it makes it more complex, and therefore more enjoyable to consider.
I think it still turns it into an „everything-shield“. The snail knowing where you plan to go completely removes any tactics you could use to throw off the snail. You can‘t just think to go one place then purposefully go to another since it‘d already know.
The whole idea of the scenario is the snail always knows where you are. You couldn't "throw off" the snail regardless. The only thing my suggestion does is make it more complicated for the human to win. It removes the boringly simple tactics. Instead of a simple "fly halfway around the world then fly back" solution, now you have to plan each step, not just considering distance from your last stop, but also distance from where you started. The snail isn't guaranteed a "win", it simply gets a fighting chance. You could always just pour molten steel on the snail and encase it in an inescapable tomb. Game over.
I think the twist is that you don't know where the snail is at the beginning. And probably it can use vehicles too.
I don't think part of it was not knowing where it was in the beginning. Didn't one of the famous answers have something to do with getting someone else to place it in some container, cover it in concrete, do a whole bunch of other stuff before dropping it in the ocean?
say it with me, class! decoy snail~
Yeah, the fact that it's chasing you implies that the snail has some amount of intelligence greater than the average snail. The solution to the problem depends heavily on just how much smarter. If it just becomes smart enough to know who you are and want to touch you, there are plenty of easy solutions. If your snail is a reincarnation of Moriarty, you'll probably die.
In all variations I've seen, the snail knows where you are at all times and wants to touch you. It varies if it's otherwise a normal snail or a super intelligent snail
I don’t think intelligence is the answer here. The snail could be driven by instinct like a moth to a flame.
Yeah, it could wander to the nearest airport and get on a plane imo
Problem is never knowing where it is
Everyone is forgetting this is a hyperintelligent snail. It could find a ride somehow...
The snail would have to follow the topography of the bottom of the ocean. Just going down and then back up the edges of the Mariana Trench would take a decade or three. Crossing the Himalayas would take several years.
The earth is smoother than a billiard ball. The Marianas trench is 11 km deep
Now imagine how long it takes for the snail to climb down it. Then back up. Now consider every other trench in the ocean. It all adds up considerably.
The snail would have to follow the topography of the bottom of the ocean. Just going down and then back up the edges of the Mariana Trench would take a decade or three. Crossing the Himalayas would take several years.
I've also heard one of the conditions being thst the snail is hyperintelligent. It may just wait until you come back or find its way onto a boat or plane
The snail could sneak on a plane
Average lifespan of a snail is 10-15 years and maximum may be around 25 years. I think we have to consider this factor as well.
>an *immortal* snail Must have missed that part
Yes
Wouldn’t you have to factor in the speed of the snail in water? I’m assuming this is a land snail and even though it won’t die from the salt or drowning, wouldn’t it significantly increase the time? That is assuming that the land snail is able to get any kind of progress at all. 🐌
Can the snail travel across large bodies of water? If not - and assuming you can know, at some point, where the snail is - this seems solvable without math.
Yeah that’s assumed, it’s immortal so it’ll crawl along the bottom of the ocean (I know that technically adds significant distance but for sake of the word problem will assume a straight line instead of the multi mile peaks and valleys lol)
Just pop it in a box and have it shipped to an orbit outside earths. Problem solved.
I mean it depends on the amount of money. If it’s a billion sure no problem. If it’s a million? Idk how much of that are you going to have to spend to get someone to pick it up and ship it off into space lol
Just pay your friend a few bucks to drop it in a sturdy box, or if you’re feeling fancy get a safe, then throw it in the ocean. The snail won’t escape before you die
Just a safe, doesn’t have to be anywhere special. I’d probably opt to keep it at home so I know where it is.
Millions should be technically enough to send it to space considering spacex's price is 1200USD/pound. Of course they probably wouldn't let you send a random snail to space without a really good reason.
Decoy snail
Or the craft explodes in flight. Or it loses orbit and Congress back down. The snail is immoral so it'll survive, but where is it?
Or it'll hop on an airplane.
What if it's a smart snail and can buy bus/train/plane ticket
Two people posted very different results, so here's a third take. The sticking point seems to be how fast a snail is. A google search gave me multiple results. I'm going to use this [1 meter per hour](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-23803958). That's also a convenient number for the math. 1 meter per hour = 24 meters a day, 8760 meters a year, 8.76 km a year. Circumference of the earth is about 40,000km, so half that if you go to the opposite side of the earth, 20,000 km. Divide by 8.76 km/year to get 2,283 years. For an 80 year limit, the snail can go a little over 700 kilometers, 435 miles. For a sense of scale, California is 1040 miles long North/South. If it started in Northern California, you could hang out in Southern California for 160+ years. So now you have 3 widely different answers. LOL. Again, the difference is the speed of the snail, the math is the same.
I own a lot of snails. They cover a lot more ground than 1 meter per hour. My tank is about 2 meters across, and after adding food it takes about 10 minutes for every snail to congregate to it.
Could they maintain this speed consistently or is that them “sprinting”
I always assuming that the death snail would be sprinting 24/7. It certainly never needs to rest. So why not sprint all the time
I think I like this one better, I googled the figures and they all match up. Hard to argue with it simply laid out like that.
One more time, with a different speed, [https://escargot-world.com/how-fast-do-snails-move/](https://escargot-world.com/how-fast-do-snails-move/) 31cm in 2 minutes 13 seconds, which equals 31cm/2.217min, 13.98cm/min, .1398m/min, .0001398km/min, .0084km/hr. .0084km/hr = .201 km/day, 73 km/year, which makes 5,880 km in 80 years. This is greater than the length of the continental US. My first post's number is a snail's typical traveling speed, and my second is a Guinness record for fastest snail. So I've now landed on both sides of u/beardyramen. u/ASKlex's number seems very high, but that is the number Google gives you. I just haven't found a source/methodoly for google's number.
Great answers here, but I think the biggest problem of this question is that you don’t know the initial location of the snail. Snail might start at India slowly snailing towards LA where you are at. You decide to move to Europe after couple of years and apparently the snail was passing by Europe at that time, meaning you will be screwed soon when you could’ve been safe for another 50 years if you just stayed in LA. Or the opposite. You both start at the same location. You could’ve just moved to the other side of the planet and live 100+years without thinking about it but instead you die instantly. So I guess the best strategy would be to stay alerted for years until you are able to locate the snail. And once you do you move to the other side of the planet. If the snail is invisible.. welp pray to the snail god.
Best play is to hole up for as many years as you can tolerate, always on guard and living a snail proof lifestyle. When you can't take it anymore, you move to the opposite side of the globe. If the snail was chasing you before, you should have however many years you hoped up for (at least) before he gets to your new location. Repeat for rest of life.
Half true since earth is a 2D plane. If the snail was up north from you and if you moved say to the west, the snail would still move closer to you. So what you really need to do is when you locate the snail, check where it came from and move to the opposite direction as well
The earth is a globe, so moving to the opposite side of the earth and back should mean that the shortest path to you each way is the same but opposite directions. Obv not exactly the same as the earth isn't a perfect sphere but that's negligible. Just move a few days early or something
Also other actors. Like a child seeing a nice looking snail before going on a trip, gets a box and takes it with them. When they get home snail escapes but is now thousand kilometres closer than before. Or birds seeing a snack and picking it up.
I mean, you can pretty easily get it into a jar if you do come across it. Either you put it in there or find someone to help. Alternatively, you can put like salt circles on your property and be pretty safe from both demons, slugs, and immortal snails.
The answer to this varies a great depending on: -Whether you know which snail it is -Whether you know where it's starting from -Whether the snail is mindlessly crawling toward wherever you happen to be, or intelligent enough to do things like use mass transit or a boat, or super-intelligent and capable of complex planning. It stops being a simple math problem in those latter cases.
If the snail has the attributes of a snail, then I don't know how you wouldn't be perfectly safe by just crossing one major ocean. Given the volatile nature of the sea, waves, storms, etc there is no way that thing is going to make it to you.
Disclaimer: i don't do imperial, it is immoral. Since earth is a sphere, if you travel too long along a direction you get back to the starting position. (Unless you are a flat earther) The maximum distance between two points on earth is just about 18'000km (half the circumference). According to google, a snail moves at most at 4.8m/h. . 80 years is (in hours) 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 80years: is 700'800hours 4.8m/h * 700'800h is just shy of 3'500km. As long as you don"t walk towards it you can even stay in the same continent no problem.
> if you travel too long along a direction you get back to the starting position. (Unless you are a flat earther) You'll get back to your starting position even if you are a flat earther, you'll just deny, deflect, and claim you're the victim of some conspiracy by Big Sphere.
I like to think that flat earthers are able to reach the edge of the world and glimpse off a huge waterfall... A man can dream
Ah, but they can't because of the Antarctic treaty which means that nobody is allowed to go to Antarctica and there is a MASSIVE navy protecting the waters to make sure nobody goes there. This navy dwarfs the US Navy butt nobody has ever heard or seen any of it. (Yes they believe that and I'm making fun of that)
Someday they will lead our community to its peak
I think top speed of a snail is 48m/h so you miscalculated by factor 10
Dunno, I grabbed the first google answer on "snail moving speed"
Yeah me too and it says 0.048km/h which is 48m/h not 4.8
Mine says 16 feet per hour 🤷 still the math is the same
A quick Google search found the following entry: “Many snails move at a speed of less than 3 inches (8 centimeters) per minute. This means that if a snail did not stop to rest or eat, it could travel 16 feet (4.8 meters) per hour.” I’ve based my math off the above. That equates to 384 ft per day, 26.54 miles per year. The shortest route from the West coast to the East coast is 2400 miles. So the snail would reach you in 90.4 years.
Any island or something across a body of water from where the snail is. Live in kansas city? Move to the other kansas city; job done.
Yo. I would want to know where the snail was at all times. So put it in a really strong container and then put the container in a safe place. Such as a safe that you then bury and check on it once in awhile. That's the real way practical and most safe way to deal with "you get X but immortal snail that kills you on contact...."
Yeah, but... decoy snail
Something I’m not sure has been mentioned when I’ve seen that snail question is… do we get to know where the snail starts from? And is it allowed to board airplanes, trains, etc?
If it was an African snail and perched on a coconut, is it possible a migrating African swallow could carry it closer to you…and you wouldn’t know?
Could you not just trap the snail in a safe? Just bait it on to something, throw said something in safe, lock safe, be safe. Problem solved.
If you know which snail it is, you're better off just locking it in a freezer (make sure someone else performs that task). It may not die, but it won't be able to move, let alone escape as long as the freezer is functional. If you don't know which snail it is (and no way of identifying it either), your best bet is to live on a plane or offworld. In the event of a plane, be sure to pay someone to lay a bunch of salt on the tarmac before landing. Annoying maybe, but if you were able to make any wish, surely you thought this through and made sure this was basically part of the deal to begin with (either outright, or simply because you have obscene amounts of money so you can pay ppl to do it for you). This is ofc assuming that the snail has some form of intelligence that allows it to 1) identify you, 2) have an unquenching desire/urge to seek you out and 3) be able locate you wherever you are. If even 1 of those criteria is not met, you can simply fool it or live your life knowing that the odds are heavily stacked in your favor.
The sail is death. It's coming for us all, but if u stop to worry about it and just live your life, u will be fine, but yah your going to die aka no matter what that snail is getting you.