If humans were only one foot tall, could we of still made all the technological advances we have today? like space shuttles, skyscrapers, airplanes, etc…?
Assuming our weight scaled in the same manner some things would actually be easier, such as aviation, space launches, and so forth because weight matters a great deal in such endeavors.
Hundred-story skyscrapers would be much easier to build.
On the other hand, I imagine that fire would have been more difficult to master. There’s a certain minimum size a flame has to be before it’s really self-sustaining.
I doubt we are ‘the perfect size’ except for a few purposes that also happen to be coincidences. Keep in mind that we already build to every technological scale remotely feasible already from nanotech all the way up to giant machines like mining crawlers. We could also do that within a fairly wide range as long as the same fundamental principles can be leveraged (building machines that build bigger machines). I am guessing that it would be better to be smaller rather than bigger as long as other animals and plants are scaled proportionally because overall resource use like most minerals would be lower.
However, the development of agriculture would be radically different if humans were one foot tall and plants remained the same size. Some engineering problems like large-scale construction dependent on human labor may be harder while others like flight would become easier. A change in size would definitely have complicated, far-reaching impacts that are hard to predict and would likely change the entire course of human history but I don’t think that size alone is a key limiting factor in the development of human technology as long as intelligence remains roughly the same.
I can say for certain that the NBA would be a very different sports league if its tallest player was 1’8". It would probably be a whole lot more fun to watch.
I’ve always said the basket should be set at 3x the height of the tallest player. 3’ tall youngsters play with a 10 foot basket. 7’ tall pros play a 21 foot basket.
It’s arguable that our brains need to be as big as they are for us to be as smart (I said arguable!) as we are. If we were Barbie-doll sized, we might not be able to figure out modern science and technology.
Of course, you could have tennis-racquet shaped people, with tiny bodies and big heads… Star Trek aliens and so on… Or it might be that smaller neurons could do the job.
Now change “agriculture” to “musical theatre” and “humans” to “elephants.”
Obtaining resources would have been an issue also. It would have been a lot more difficult for people who were only one foot tall to operate an iron mine, for example.
Wouldn’t rockets have to be pretty much the same size they are now in order to achieve escape velocity?
We are definitely just the right size for technology which is proof that there is an intelligent designer. Or neither is true if you think about it for a very short amount of time.
Amazing!
We are exactly the right size for the technology we developed!
The interesting thing about this statement is that some things scale and some don’t.
A firearm, for example. Part of the reason for the barrel length has to do with fundamental principles of gas expansion and angular deviation and others. So the size of the gun would still need to be comparable to modern day firearms in order to have similar range and accuracy.
Of course, since 1 foot high people run much more slowly, and they have a much smaller melee reach distance, firearms don’t need such a long range. I can imagine 2 firing lines 50 feet apart or something when these people fight the Civil War and a bayonet charge from that distance failing because the other side has lots of cannons.
On the other hand, iron mined for the purpose of building various tools and furnishings, you’d need proportionally less. Need iron for the gate hinges on your castle? The gate’s only 2 feet high, so the hinges are much smaller.
The iron mine itself would also be much smaller, with gopher hole sized passages. This part would actually be easier - 1 foot people might have trouble swinging a big pick, but 1 foot high passages are much less prone to collapse than 6 foot high passages. (much smaller void volumes, much less area of internal surfaces under rock pressure)
If people were only one foot tall, a lot more animals would be hunting humans. Wolves, for instance, would probably be terrifying. So would we ever have developed domesticated dogs? My understanding is that the first dogs were cousins of wolves.
What I’m trying to get at is, if humans were only one foot tall, would we still be enjoying the same level of technological success that we are today? (This question assumes the one foot tall humans have the same level of intelligence as we do.)
And what about animal husbandry and beasts of burden? Oxen and horses would be terrifyingly huge and probably very impractical, if not impossible to tame for a 1 ft. tall population.
Perhaps we’d learn to ride beavers and fly on eagles.
And what about the other animals that evolved parallel to us? How big would chimps and monkeys be? At some point, every animal would be smaller along with us.
There are humans like Verne Troyer who are pretty small. I don’t think it’s realistic to have our current proportions and be 1 foot tall (brain too small), but I think we could have a build like Verne’s and maybe be that height, with the same average intelligence.
Actually, given that one-foot tall humans would have much smaller skulls, they’d have much smaller brains. So it’s probably not a valid assumption that they’d have the same level of intelligence.
You’re fighting the hypothetical. Brain tissue is probably enormously larger than it has to be to accomplish the same task. If you could build circuits, in 3d, with anatomically precise components (so you use the smallest number of atoms per logic gate that you can while maintaining adequate reliability), you could probably build a machine that was logically equivalent to a human mind but fit into a much smaller space.
I don’t know how small a space it might be, but a ping pong ball or so sounds about right. This is just a guess - I know that human neurons are massive complexes of systems, with layer after layer of fatty myelin as insulation. A carbon fiber wire wrapped with a few atoms thick insulative layer could replace a much larger structure if you were building a brain that used analogous components.
So beings that are 1 foot high but as smart as humans is almost certainly possible.
This is probably correct. Several species of bird have amazingly sophisticated mental abilities, despite having a brain the size of a walnut. This may be because they use a completely different part of their brain for abstract reasoning.
See
If a bird of this kind evolved to the same sort of level of competence as a human, it might get away with a brain a fraction of the size of ours.