There is a ton of movies out there depicting giant spiders and such, but we all know they could not possibly be real(on earth) due to the ole m1m2/2G which would(with m2 equaling the mass of earth) crush their bones and turn them into an amusing, albeit physically impossible source of nutrition.
So say I had a shrink ray that could shrink humans, whats the tiniest viable human I could achieve based on earth’s gravity, bloods surface tension and so on? I ask because I am worried, what if these movies weren’t about giant spiders, what if they were about tiny humans!
I mean the entire human body, with the right vat pressure you could get a human brain to survive under any gravity, provided the relative pressure of the blood being pumped in stayed close to what it is in nature.
How are we shrinking these humans? Are we just compressing them, making them very dense? Or are we selectively removing a proportion of their atoms? Because either way there are going to be grave consequences, and I don’t see any other way of doing it. You’re going to screw up the cellular structure and biochemistry before your human gets much smaller than a midget.
Um. If you want to eat freshly crushed giant spider, please, by all means, knock yourself out. Me? I’m going to be over here, horking into these bushes. :o
You can have a physically functional “monkey” type primate as small as a Pygmy Marmoset. The main issue is brain size and I don’t know how small that can get before you start to lose normative human intellectual capacity.
Isaac Asimov wrote a column on this topic back in 1969, when the tv show “Land of the Giants” was on. The column was titled “The Incredible Shrinking People” and it was re-published in book form in 1969 in The Solar System and Back.
His general thesis was that miniaturization was impossible, because of the minimal number of neurons needed to keep the brain working - that number would collide with the size of atoms. (At least, that’s my non-scientific recollection - it’s been a while since I read it.)
There are arguments back and forth that even the Hobbits (*Homo floresiensis) *had too small of a brain capacity for tool use. These near men were only about 3’ 6" in height from the few samples so far found and reported on.
Khagendra Thapa Magar of Nepal is only 22" tall and 12 lbs at age 18. He appears to be the shortest man on record. He does suffer from learning disabilities though but is apparently learning to read. There have been a few other adults recorded for similar heights.
Jyoti Amge of India is only 23" tall and has normal mental capabilities. She is 16.
So 2’ might be the reasonable limit, especially if you can shrink the body more than the head. All of these men seem to be what use to be referred to as Dwarves. Little People where the head is out of proportion to the body.
Hopefully that helps as a bit of a baseline at least.
But he made a good job of justifying it in his novelisation of Fantastic Voyage. In his re-working of the script, every atom got smaller and less massive. Therefore the miniatured humans retained all their neurons.
What are you talking about? Babies’ brains are not smaller than human brains are now, they are exactly the same size as (their own) human brains are now.
Define “smaller than it is now”. The adult human brain comes in a range of sizes.
Primordial dwarfs have much smaller brains, too, but they certainly are human. So, I would say that we know we can make it as small as the smallest person with that condition. It doesn’t say how small her brain was, but Lucia Zarate weighed less than 5 pounds at age 17.
I’d say much smaller than my buddy Aditya Dev, with me on the left and the loss of cranial capacity would diminish the humanness of what’s left.
My point is there is a lower limit. You can’t take us down to beetle size, like in the movies. Rumor to the contrary, all that white and grey matter actually does something. Most primordial dwarf types, and obviously all the ones with microcephaly, are mentally retarded. Russel-Silvers may not be mentally handicapped, but they have larger cranial capacities than other types, on average.
These mentally challenged folks are still obviously fully human, but if all humans had very small brains, humanness would be an entirely different thing…
