Taking the plot of Fantastic Voyage plus the fact that x^2:x^3 phenomena drastically change the apparent strengths of things (and other properties), would shrunken humans gain superhuman strength, resiliance, and other abilities? Would huge falls not be a problem? Would tiny guns become ineffective?
They would quickly die from exposure. There’s a reason that small animals have high metabolisms.
A shrunken human would face all sorts of problems that would probably result in a speedy demise, unless it was a shrunken, radically redesigned human. The viscosity of our blood, the surface area and structure of our lungs (and the viscosity of the air they’re meant to process), the thickness of our skin - all these things don’t work the same when scaled down.
Then I shall only use the shrink ray against mine enemies.
Perhaps the shrink ray shrinks the atoms and so on of it’s targets as well, and not just their height. Interacting with the non-shrunken world would still be a problem, but if everything down to the fundamental particles composing your bodies were shrunk down to the same degree, at least your internal functions would work.
Yeah, maybe, although scaling down atoms, along with their fundamental properties and forces might actually make existence in the non-shrunken world a problem (that is, involuntary interaction with it) - suddenly everything around you - including the air in which you are immersed - has considerably more strength and force than you do. Brownian motion could perforate you. Surface tension from water vapour in the air could dessicate you.
If the atoms were shrunk proportionally to the structure they compose wouldn’t that structure (e.g. The human body) greatly increase in density? If so wouldn’t that make the structure on an atomic level stronger than the “normal” atomic level of the rest of the world? Is there anything to show that reduction of atomic volume without modification of atomic mass would be inversely affective?
If your atoms were scaled down, what the hell would you breathe?
I remember an old DC comic from the 1960s, showing The Arom sitting inside an Oxygen atom, and his thinking that as long as he was in the oxygen atiom he wouldn’t suffocate. This made sense, for a nanosecond or so.
Not to mention the results when molecules are formed with shrunken atoms and normal atoms. What happens with free electrons?
Either air that’s been shrunk down with you ( you’d best have an oxygen tank & mask or a sealed vehicle & air supply shrunk with you ), or have shrunk along with you some sort of combo breather and shrink ray ( to shrink air down for you ). The vehicle idea seems most practical, as far as the term applies for a discussion like this.
You’d need to take shrunken oxygen though. I doubt very much something as complex as the body’s chemistry would deal well with relatively giant oxygen atoms floating around in the body.
The effects are pretty interesting to think about. Would vision work the same? The eyes would be alot smaller relative to the wave lengths they’re designed for. I’d wager a photon would interact with more rods and cones. Assuming the much smaller eye could pick up light at all; everything would be amazingly blurry.
Same for hearing. Your ears would have a much smaller sound collection area, and do to your high density (a couple hundred pounds compressed down to a few inches) the sound that did make it into your ears would have a much harder time vibrating them. It’d be like trying to make a set of drums out of a solid hunk of lead.
What about physics of it? How are the atoms shrunk? Is it a honey I shrunk the kids thing where space is just removed from the atoms? I don’t know how survivable that would be. To do that you’d have to knock all the electrons to a lower electron shell. That’d release alot of energy. As the energy from being in a higher shell has to go somewhere. Think every atom in your body dumping electrostatic force from every electron at once. You’d be a crispy critter. Plus the chemistry of it. I’m not a chemist but valance shells would seem to be pretty important in chemistry. It’d wreck havoc on the bodies delicate chemistry. So assuming you weren’t roasted alive by your own electrons your metabolism would prolly fail.
I’d wager to be survivable the fundamental particles would have to be shrunk, and proportionally so would their forces. Which would be pretty interesting in it’s self. How would miniatoms interact with normal atoms?
In approximately the same way a jellyfish might interact with a bus, I think.
Arthur C Clarke had an essay about this topic in one of his non fiction books. If anyone has his collection “Greetings Carbon Based Bipeds” you can read it for yourself.
So what would happen if you shrink the atoms? Would that counter-act the square-cube law? Would shrinking the atoms’ masses and all other properties do that?
Btw, maybe you can just shrink the cells. The smallest insect egg, from Zenillia pullata, is 20um across. When it’s done maturing, this thing is still the same size but is a full, breathing, multicellular organism that can find its own food. By comparison, a typical human cell is 10um. If you let the shrinker perform other bio optimizations… who knows.