Inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone, how would the technology of tiny people work?
Let’s say that our hypothetical people are 6 inches tall. When they create a computer similarly proportioned to their size as we have, will it have less ‘power?’ (processing speed, memory, whatever) Would their electrical wiring be inferior? Any difference in purely mechanical devices like gears or levers?
My best guess is that their capability to miniaturize devices would be inferior to ours, since they’re running up against the barrier of individual molecules sooner.
People that small don’t have enough room in their heads for the sort of brain power that’s needed to develop the level of intelligence to build computers, so you really can’t answer the question in any meaningful way. If you assume a universe different enough to allow that sort of thing to happen, then the properties of their world are going to be highly tied to how exactly that universe differs from the real one.
But speaking a little less hypothetically, you do need a certain amount of area for the sorts of circuits that we need in computers, and you need some space for heat to dissipate. There’s a very good reason why it’s exciting whenever somebody builds a smaller computer. I don’t want to be famous for incorrectly predicting that nothing smaller will ever be built, but the challenges associated with making computers much smaller than they are now (i. e., cell phone sized) are very real and very difficult.
It’s an interesting question for speculation, though. When you shrink things down (or blow things up) the physics gets very different, and so what you use for different purposes can be very different. Some bacteria, for instance, use their ability to sense earth’smagnetic field not to determine north, but to tell up from down.
I don’t know of anyone who’s done an extensive study of the physics of small vs. large, but James Blish’s classic short story, Surface Tension, describes the travails of a collection of tiny human beings trying to survive in an alien pond, and to build a “ship” to take them out of the pond elsewhere – no trivial thing when you’ve got gills and the titular surface tension is a palpable and considerable force to be reckoned with.
Smelting the materials to make gears and mechanical devices (or semiconductors, for that matter) would be an enormous challenge for Lilliputians - fire doesn’t scale down in the right way to make it possible - they would somehow have to collaborate to make and operate human-scale smelting works.
I didn’t consider brainpower, but that does appear to be a pretty big consideration. Assuming that we use most of our brains (and I think that’s the safe assumption, not the 10% urban legend), 1/12 the brain doesn’t leave a whole lot of space for much else besides the essentials.
CalMeacham- The story sounds interesting. I’ll try to find it online, but if you have a link, feel free.
Cecil has a few words to say on the 10% legend, but if you think about it, a six inch person would probably have a brain about the size of a mouse’s. That gives you an idea of what they’d be capable of.
I don’t think their brain would be 1/12th the volume of ours. Wouldn’t it be 1/1728ths (that is, 1 over 12 to the third power?) That’s assuming that the lilliputians are 1/12th the height of normal humans but proportional in every dimension.
To a certain extent, our computers are as big as they are because of the human interface (the keyboard, etc). The actual processor in a PC is tiny. So assuming that you can build some sort of miniature input devices, you might not need to miniaturize the CPU.
Would chemical impurities become a more significant factor? As the total number of molecules declines, the effects of “wrong” molecules might become more pronounced.
I think you might only need to square 1/12, so 1/144. I only guess this because ultrafilter’s mouse analogy sounds close and our brains being 144x bigger than a mouse’s sounds more reasonable than 1728x
But I think they run into a wall sooner than we do. That is to say, a lilliputian can only miniaturize their proportional computer’s components say 5 steps until they’re using molecules or atoms as the basic pieces. Since we’re bigger, our technology gets a few more steps messing with multiple molecules until we start manipulating the individual ones.
But that would make sense only if you were doubling mere one dimension. If everything remains in proportion, then 12 times the height also means twelve times the width and twelve times the depth; 12 cubed, or 1728. Likewise, reducing the height by a factor of 12, but keeping all else in proportion, means 1/12th the depth & width, or a reduction by a factor of 1728.
Also, to your mouse thing–humans and mice are not proportional; the bodies are shaped entirely differently.
I think I follow; envisioning a 6ft mouse standing next to me (besides being a disturbing image) puts it perspective for me. I’d ask the imaginary rodent if I could crack open his skull, but…
