an-gremlin: timemachineyeah: I think I’ve mentioned it on here before but one of the many impo
an-gremlin:timemachineyeah:I think I’ve mentioned it on here before but one of the many impossible “what if” scenarios that my brain will sometimes get stuck in and runs around in like a hamster in a hamster wheel where I can’t stop or change course and I’m just stuck pondering this one idea very seriously and in depth and worrying over not having answers and unable to get sleep because I can’t easily google the answers even though you don’t NEED ANSWERS because it’s a SILLY QUESTION is “what if one day a disease stuck all of humanity that made us shrink down to 1/12 our size as soon as we feel asleep and soon all of humankind was doll-sized with this giant human sized world that we all have to relearn to navigate” and anyway this series of photos made me think of that because I wonder if eventually we’d rebuild industry and make things we used to have, but smaller.Oh god this is a really… interesting question because whenever you see tiny societies in fiction they just have smaller versions of everything but that’s not how that works. I don’t even want to try to get into textiles and fluid dynamics for this but I will say that thanks to the square-cube law we’d all be a lot sturdier relative to our size than we used to be - our mass and volume would decrease by 1/8 while our surface area only decreased by ¼, which would allow us to survive longer falls relative to our size, as well as reducing our terminal velocity significantly which would make falling from very high places a lot less dangerous and ——–oh my god I just realized you said 1/12 not ½. Nah we’d be well and truly boned lol we would be 0.05% of our original mass, if you weighed 90kg (~200lbs) before you would only weigh 45 GRAMS afterwards. That’s assuming SOMEHOW all the cells in our bodies shrunk and behaved as before….Honestly bless you just for taking the question seriously. I genuinely have stayed awake at night going “but if I woke up tomorrow very small, would I be buried in my own giant clothes and blankets? Would I be able to breathe? Would I be strong enough to move the cloth enough to tunnel my way out? How would I get off my bed? Would my cat eat me?” And like if it were JUST ME that was small that’s enough problems, but assuming I manage to not die instantly the plan would be Get To Phone or Otherwise Get Roommate’s Attention and then theoretically I’d get help adjusting to the rest. But if it was EVERYONE basically all at once???? What would we eat? How would we find each other??? Like what kind of state of emergency would result and what would we do??? How would society reform???? Would all governments collapse? Like assuming (wildly and improbably) our cells shrunk with us and our biology didn’t change too radically, but suddenly all of humanity was like 5-6 inches tall as adults instead of 5-6 feet, what would happen? How many people would die straight away? Assuming survivors, how would we maintain or rebuild or infrastructure? Would money still matter now that all cash and coins are basically uselessly unwieldy? What happens to medicine?? What happens to everything??? -- source link
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