So imagine I invent an incredible shrinking machine that can shrink anyone down to whatever size. How small could the average person be shrunk before things like breathing became a problem, presumably due to the size of non-shrunken oxygen atoms entering your lungs. Or anything else that might cause problems.
If we got over any breathing problems using a tiny little breathing apparatus, how would you react to gravity, and what might one see down there? Could you hop around between these pollen grains?
Are you imagining shrinking the persons individual atoms, so that she has the same number of atoms, just smaller ones? Not very much, then. Even just letting someone drink only heavy water will kill them, due to the slightly different behavior of Hydrogen with and without a neutron in the nucleus. All your biological chemical reactions are finely balanced, and it doesn’t take much to mess them up.
As another example of ZenBeam’s issue: most of the chemical reactions in your body rely on partial electric charges to bind enzymes together, to carry atoms, etc. If you shrank the size of everything in your body, you’d increase the force of those electric charges. 1/2 the size means all of those electromagnetic forces would be 4x as strong. If you’re jumping around between pollen grains, we’re talking millions of times stronger; nothing would ever unbind and you’d be unable to even breath oxygen that had also been scaled down for because your hemoglobin would never let go of it.
Gravity would be unaffected, however. It depends on on the distance from the Earth - no change in your size will affect it. You would have huge problems getting around because of that. If you still weigh 150 lbs with all of that force was concentrated on to tiny little feet, you’d find yourself waist deep in just about any soft surface. You’d rip right through carpet and be embedded in the subfloor. Same with couches, lawns, wooden decks and all sorts of other surfaces.
I’m going to assume that molecules, cells, and so on don’t shrink, but rather that there are fewer molecules, etc. in a tiny human.
We know that tiny vertebrates, such as mice, moles, shrews, etc., function just fine with regard to breathing air, drinking ordinary water, and handling gravity. So I think you could shrink a human down to that size and still have a biologically functional creature.
To get smaller than that, though, you need to look at other kinds of animals, such as insects. Some species of insects are darn near microscopic. However, insects don’t have lungs like humans and other vertebrates do, and I suspect that a fruit-fly sized human would have to forego lungs in favor of insect-like breathing organs.
The bigger question, in my mind, is how the change in scale would affect the intelligence of a miniaturized human. One reason humans and other great apes are so intelligent is that they all have a large brain with a highly convoluted cerebrum. Even human infants are born with comparatively large brains, and many forms of dwarfism have no relationship to intelligence. If you were to create a human being the size of a mouse, would its brain be large enough to proved (for lack of a better word) the processing power of an anatomically normal, full-size human brain? Or would a mouse-sized human be limited to the intelligence of other tiny animals?
And of course, if you just shrunk the person in size without altering the laws of physics, if you shrink them to the size of a mouse, they’d have a mouse-sized brain, and would be about as smart as a mouse.
Absolute brain size has very little to do with intelligence. More important is the ratio of brain to body size, or cortex to “lower” brain areas.
"If only people would shrink
Our world wouldn’t be so overcrowded
Bring ourselves down to size
There’d be so much more food to go 'round
Why don’t we build a machine
With all the know-how of the industries
We put a man on the moon
On earth we’ll need more room to breathe real soon"
Let’s say there is a real life Wayne Szalinski and let’s say he invents an actual device that can be used to shrink anything to any size.
“There is a man named Wayne Szalinski and he invented an actual device that can be used to shrink anything to any size!”
…now that that has been said… let’s get to my question…
What if you shrunk someone or something that breathes oxygen to a size smaller than a molecule of oxygen? Would that someone or something still be capable of breathing or would the oxygen be “too big” to inhale?
…
To take this even further… would the sperm of a shrunken male(not necessarily a male the size of a molecule… we’ll go with the size in the movie “Honey, I shrunk the kids”) still be able to fertilize an egg in a normal sized woman, and if so would there be any abnormalities in the development of the baby and/or would there be any genetic mutations passed to the baby?
Scenario 2:
Some atoms are removed, so that the subject is made of normal-sized atoms, but fewer of them.
I’d say that in scenario 1, you wouldn’t be able to breathe. Or rather, you’d breathe, but it wouldn’t do you any good. Once you’ve changed the size of an atom, you’ve changed the way it will interact with other atoms. Thus, all chemical reactions will be different. Thus, probably no useful oxygen in the bloodstream.
Plus, everyone knows that tiny atoms are very expensive.
The problem with this premise is that probably millions of things about the body, from large-scale square-cube law reactions to the way that proteins fold in 3-space to individual chemical reactions would change drastically (and at different scales) once the shrinking started. If you take the notion seriously at all you find that you can’t handwave it into meaningfulness. It fails at too many points.
Hey Jimcando… I never read this question you posted until five minutes ago. Go to my question and read what I posted about a half hour before someone posted a link to this question.
