The Transporter thread got me thinking about this.
Unless we’re talking about shrinking the actual atoms that people are made from, humans shrunk to the size of ants would die. So many of the mechanisms and processes in our bodies do not scale up or down as they do in the movies. The viscosity of fluids, for one thing, would make blood circulation impossible.
I liked the way they handled the physics of miniaturization in Fantastic Voyage (the novelization went into more detail). Basically the miniaturized objects are “farther away” in a higher dimension, and the effect leaks away exponentially after a short time (only an hour or so).
The simple way to understand the problem of scaling, instantly, is by dimension.
take height as x.
Surface area is related to x^2.
Volume is related to x^3.
If you make a person half as tall, then surface area is 1/4 the original.
For example, if you reduce the height to 1/4 , the surface area is 1/16th , but the food is reduced to 1/64th… Therefore the energy spend on walking increases, when you calculate energy spend in terms of a meal. (you spend more meals on walking… which may not leave energy to obtain the food… so you starve. )
If you were shrunk to ant-size, you’ll probably die of dehydration in a few minutes (if the bugs don’t get you first.)
If you could shrink down to tiny size a few times a day, it would severely cut down on food bills. You’d only need a few grains of meat and a drop of water.
it’s sad that the only notable movie of this type was in 1989…
Tiny humans would have a really hard time staying warm, as their mass to area ratio would get far smaller. They’d also struggle with how sticky things are, and difficult to let go of. But they’d find they could survive falls way better than before, and holding up their weight would be much easier.
Except they left their ship inside his body, famously nitpicked by Isaac Asimov.
You’d feel practically weightless if shrunken to the proportions as seen in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.*
But as others have mentioned, you’d die almost straight away, as too many things don’t scale down well at all for metabolization at almost every biological process.
Though the thought of miniaturization is a fascinating subject for fiction, I like to think of Asimov’s idea, in his sequel novel of Fantastic Voyage, that there’s a containment field around them and the ship. Anything that crosses the field is miniaturized.
And although I can’t remember if he explains how this is supposed to work, I always imagined it shrunk not the particles particles themselves, but the space of repulsion and even bonds between the electrons in some way that still allowed all chemistry to work just fine.
*Besides that movie, I also loved Inner Space as well. But yeah, I would love to see James Cameron (or someone adept at the science and ideas involved) tackle a more realistic science-fiction miniaturization movie of this type.
Or (with slightly more relevance) The Doctor (Tom Baker) explains how the TARDIS is bigger on the inside:
Take one of these guns. Shrink it down to hand-held size, and mount it in a pistol grip. Add a un-shrinker to the end of the muzzle, so the shells revert to full size when fired. You’ve got yourself quite the personal weapon there.
Conservation of momentum means the shells drop impotently to the ground at your feet as soon as they are un-shrinked.
Dead whales on the beach wouldn’t be a problem anymore. If it worked on inanimate objects (and why not?), then demolishing buildings and dealing with garbage would be much easier.
Tinyfying a living organism woudl make that organism inanimate very quickly.
For inanimate objects I believe that the tinyfying and embiggening would use a lot of energy, probably more than the energy cost to transport these items in standard scale. However, if mass is reduced as well as size, then a Shrink Ray would be an incredible boon to the space program. Imagine boosting a doll-house-sized station, which would embiggen in orbit to a full-sized habitat.
Although nearly unwatchable, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids apparently DID overcome issues with scale, dehydration, and energy consumption. Why not just roll with that?
As for me, I’d spend most of my time getting small.
I read an Isaac Asimov book that detailed the problems inherent with shrinking people a la “Fantastic Voyage.”
One problem he noted is that oxygen molecules would be larger relative to the cells that need them causing you to suffocate to death. So, you wouldn’t need to just shrink yourself and go out into the world. You’d also have to shrink down everything your body uses.
You people and your science! shakes fist
Hypothetical: You’re small and everything works just fine, the laws of physics scale down to your size.
Smuggling would be a lot easier, storage warehouses would go out of business, and finally I can stage the kind of animal vs. animal battles that would be exciting to watch (because nobody cares about bugs but they have an issue if you throw a lion and a hippo together in an arena to maul each other).
And in my example up thread, even if you were bound by a field that shrunk anything that passed within it, would you still have the same mass? That is, if I were the size of a mite but still weigh 180 lbs.?