The Case for Making Humans Smaller
nautil.us
The Case for Making Humans Smaller
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#2Is this the initial negotiating position/height of an upcoming transhumanist movie villain? At least the article called out the role of embryo screening in neo-eugenics.
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#3Being very small would have other fun advantages. You'd have a much higher strength to weight ratio than today's humans, for both your muscles and bones. You'd probably be able to jump your own height or even more. Falls would be much less damaging. Not just everyday falls, but you might be able to survive falling at terminal velocity, as cats can, thus allowing you to fall from any height. Even wilder, it might be possible to fly under your own power with an appropriate wingsuit. Certainly personal helicopters and/or jetpacks would be possible.
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#4...aaaaaaaaaannd Nautilus just jumped the popsci shark into the land of "SCIENCE IS FUCKING AWESOME!" blogs.
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#5Napoleon!
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#6If overpopulation really is a problem, is it not much easier to control population? It's probably much easier to convince someone to have at most two children, rather than to convince him/her to let scientists fiddle with their gametes so that their children are dwarves.
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#7Is it logical that when we can't even limit population growth where it matters or curtail CO2 production, we should abandon these lesser goals and take on a global pan-cultural genetic engineering project?
Is some academic trying to bolster the social visibility section of their grant application for research into human height determinants?
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#8The 2% food consumption seems like an overly-simplified calculation from the mass reduction. My understanding is that the smaller animals are, the larger their surface area to mass ratio, and so their loss of heat increases. Metabolic rate is much higher. Shrews need to eat 90% of their bodyweight everyday or else they die.
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#9If overpopulation really is a problem, is it not much easier to control population? It's probably much easier to convince someone to have at most two children, rather than to convince him/her to let scientists fiddle with their gametes so that their children are dwarves.
There seem to be psychological barriers to public discussion of the (many!) downsides of ever-growing populations. I guess people feel like they're discussing genocide.
Re: The Case for Making Humans Smaller
#10Why stop at 50 cm? In the long term, if the children of humanity continue to inhabit physical bodies, there's no need for them to be larger than a millimetre in size. Plenty of room at the bottom.
The benefits of reduced resource use don't stop on Earth. A 1 kg payload ought to be sufficient for an interplanetary or interstellar voyage.