An early Giant-Man issue has a crook swipe multiple doses of the growth serum to get throw-a-car superstrength, except oh, crap, that’s the shrinking serum; Pym helpfully narrates as said crook dwindles down to, and then past, microbe size.
I’d shrink Tokyo and sell Godzilla suits to folks who want to stomp around it.
Another idea: it’ll be less expensive to make sci-fi/fantasy movies if all you have do is build miniature sets and shrink the actors to fill them. And then negotiate the actors’ salaries while they’re still small.
Would it be possible to create a “shrink field” around the starship, effectively shrinking space as you travel through it? distance would decrease immediately in front of you, then(if only a temporary effect) go back to normal after you pass through it.
Holy shit-I think I just invented a new Science fiction idea!
If I had both technologies, I’d shrink people so they could go on miniature wildlife safaris. They would ride on the backs of beetles which I’d rent them the controllers to.
More happy than sad about this-it looks to be theoretically possible.
shrink the earth so we can frolic in low-g
Or its opposite, the Bloater Drive, but for that, you need to raid Giant Man’s lab.
Here’s an idea. Shrink down a large amount of water and store it in a tank. Then you pump a trickle of this miniaturized water into a modified internal combustion engine, with de-shrinkers instead of spark plugs. The rapidly expanding water takes the place of burning fuel to drive the pistons. So you have an engine that runs on water and exhausts pure water.
Another possibility is to do something similar using shrinking/expanding air, since you can get air from around the engine - now you have a perpetual motion machine.
You could drop a magnet down through a copper coil by shrinking the pillar it’s on, and push it back up again by returning the pillar to its normal height.
I’ll create effective and cheap inner city housing. One skyscraper split into thousands of one-square foot apartments. You and all your stuff gets shrunk when you bring it in, and you get re-embiggended as you leave. The queue in the morning will be insane, but at least there is no commute.
Do shrunken computers work as normal? If so, office buildings with a thousand times more workers, each working as normal. Or the people in the home scraper can telecommute and skip the lines.
First thing I’d do is ship off an embiggening ray to some old co-workers of mine, who could make it work while hanging through the bottom of an aircraft, and install/tweak any necessary targeting apparatus. Then I’d partner with the Gates Foundation to completely revolutionize charitable food distribution. Drop tiny food package without danger of injuring people or buildings, scan drop site to ensure safety, then send the embiggening plane through to zap it on the ground. Solve the distribution problem and world hunger is solved.
Then we move on to shelter. Although I’m a little unclear on this “shrinking the entity” limitation. Can I build a simple apartment building and shrink it whole? Can I include systems like wiring and plumbing? Given the complexity of humans, and the success with them I’m guessing the answer is yes; but the disparity in materials is much greater throughout a building. So I can take an abandoned building from downtown Detroit, drop it into a refugee camp, and then fix it up as needed to provide basic sanitation and shelter. The cost would not be much greater than providing tents and water delivery in the old way.
Then I target FEMA and Home Insurance companies. Imagine just shrinking and removing every building in the path of a hurricane? Of course we’d have to dis- and re-connect all the plumbing and such, but really the cost is so much lower, it would be hard to define the “just in case” threshold. Move houses with a 30% chance of being hit by a Category 3 hurricane? I predict statistical analysis becomes the new “Boom” employment sector.
Now we start to talk about fresh water. And here’s where the wars will be fought. Will we move a glacier to the middle of the Sahara to provide drinking water? How much of Antartica can we safely re-distribute? When the Middle Eastern Oil billionaires start dumping truckloads of money on us to create and maintain artificial lakes for their planned destination resorts, will we accommodate them to the detriment of the glacial environment?
And come to think of it, could we more easily/cheaply desalinate sea water if we could shrink it first? Or would the RO filters not work on he smaller particles? If we shrink the filters too, have we gained anything? Or is it really just the same logistical gains of moving that water around - not that those aren’t enormously useful.
Also, if we shrink a battery to provide electricity to working tiny machinery, what happens the actual moving electrons? Do they still power machinery or have they become a different sort of particle now?
Next would of course be mining. Being able to aim the shrink ray at unwanted soil/rocks and move it easily would wreak havoc with world gold an diamond prices, but it would also greatly decrease the environmental impact on surrounding areas.
And could we aim it at a big chunk of shale? How could we define the barriers of what would be shrunk? If we could cart it off to a big mill, which would crush, collect the gas, and then return the rest of the shale material, then we could collect the gas without destroying local water supplies, or injecting chemicals into the ground.
As for the combustion engine ideas above, I’m assuming that the shrink ray requires some amount of energy to work. I’m guessing it would be unable to create more energy than it used.
Actually I said the human testing was DONE on Welshmen, many of whom perished nobly (or as nobly as one of those … persons … can perish, in the process of making the shrink-ray safe for decent folk.