I wish I still had that Isaac Asimov book. He was a consultant on the movie and really went into detail about the complexities involved. He questioned how they were going to be miniaturized. Would it be that their atoms would be shrunk, making them incredibly dense or would a proportion of their atoms be taken away so that they’d be smaller versions of themselves? If a proportion of their atoms were taken away, he said that they wouldn’t have enough matter in their brains for complex thoughts. He went into a lot of detail about how it wasn’t feasible with either process. I think he also wrote the novelization of the movie and attempted to make it “scientific.”
Are we? I thought we were just answering the OP’s question.
Some people would enjoy some rather kinky sex.
I guess I didn’t make myself perfectly clear. I meant it to be hypothetical. Forget the actual science. It all works…what would it change?:smack:
But that is part of the problem. We have a lot of sciencey-types here. For a shrink ray to work as shown in movies, then there would need to be something fundamentally different about physics, such as “matter is not made of atoms” level different.
Once something that counterfactual is introduced, all bets are off.
The field is a neat idea. Although rather than manipulating matter in a logical sort of way, what if the field is an extradimensional bubble. Stuff can go in and out of it and is properly proportioned depending on which side it’s on. That lets you scale down your environment while you’re in it, but keeps the overall mass tiny relative to the outside world. So you’re not really shrinking anything, just moving it into a less spacious dimension.
Okay, so if we are going to ignore the science/physics part of it, then don’t movies cover what would happen if you were to shrink people down? OOOOooo, normally mundane things would be big and scary compared to you… yawn…. movies have already covered what would happen if you ignore the physics… what new ground are we attempting to cover here?
I love it. Cut and print it… guys, we have a movie!
Exactly.
Ignoring the laws of physics: you carry on as in the movie HIStK, and are in awe of giant grass blades, and scared of giant bees and lawn mowers.
Or,
Keeping the laws of physics, you immediately die as your microscopic body, which still weighs 200 pounds, shoots through every floor of your house like a hot knife through butter, and your corpse ends up embedded in the concrete foundation forever.
Now that’s cool. Short, but cool.
I think the OP is asking: what would be the social/political/economic effect of a shrink ray, assuming one were possible (and presumably nothing much else changes, including all of the rest of science)
I was thinking more along the lines of what could we do with it that we can’t do now.
I was just having fun with the idea, not looking for the reasons it wouldn’t work :smack:. So just forget it.
Was that not a documentary?
Usually, fighting the hypothetical is on my list of things that will be bannable offenses when I become dictator, but I’ll make an exception in this case, because the fact that most things don’t scale very well is actually interesting. In geometry, scale doesn’t matter. A square of size has X has the same properties as one twice or half the size. In the real world, however, scaling things up or down tend to mess them up in very serious ways. Big and small are absolute, not relative. That’s not really intuitive, and it’s not obvious that the world should work that way. It’s interesting, and has some cool consequences.
We could shrink down soldiers to fight wars to take ant hills.
Damn, scooped again. I just described Iowa. Seems to take a lot longer to drive through Iowa than you’d think, given it’s size on the map.
Real-life macrophilia play. :eek:
If normal conservation laws applied then you couldn’t grow the shells in the first place; you’re adding an awful lot of mass/energy in the process. Clearly the process involves somehow extracting and depositing energy in some kind of external pool; or else you’d never be able to grow anything, and when you shrunk things you’d get a massive energy release from the lost mass.
Come to think of it you can easily make a perpetual motion machine with this technology, given how it’s portrayed as a low-energy process. Build a wheel with weights that are grown on the way down and shrunk on the way up, and turn a generator with it.
We could scale down everyone. Suddenly we live in a far larger world with far more space relative to our tiny selves.
We could build city sized space habitats, complete with farms and factories and everything needed to sustain life & civilization, shrink down them and their inhabitants to a size that fits on a rocket and send them into space. The rocket itself can just be a big tank of shrunken water with a nozzle equipped with a “grow” device at one end; expand the water and it’ll shoot out the end, producing thrust. Space exploration & colonization just got a lot easier.
Repairs and maintenance on mechanics or machinery that has very tight spaces would now be able to accommodate a shrunken crew.
Can we shrink just parts of our bodies like fat or your worst enemies penis?
I’d have the first pet micro-zebra. I’d name him Derek.