Is 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.
Being 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.
Disadvantages include moving down the foodchain. I live in an inner suburb of a city, and I see foxes in my street. At my current height, they're a curio - but at 50cm tall, they're a viable threat.
In the present study, the effects of pure isometric scaling on vertical jumping performance were investigated using a biologically realistic model of the human musculoskeletal system. The input of the model, muscle stimulation over time, was optimized using jump height as criterion. It was found that when the human model was miniaturized to the size of a mouse lemur, with a mass of about one-thousandth that of a human, jump height dropped from 40 cm to only 6 cm, mainly because of the force-velocity relationship. In reality, mouse lemurs achieve jump heights of about 33 cm
If 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.
Is 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?
The 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.
Also, our brains currently consume 20% of the energy produced by our bodies. Even if you manage to "shrink" humans down to 50cm, their brains would still consume 20% of our current energy need for brain only.
And there's the added problem of the well-established correlation between body size and longevity. If we scaled down to cat size, it is reasonable to expect we'd die at 50 instead of 80, even taking our outsize longevity factor into account (https://musingsofajunglequeen.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/sl...).
The correlation you note is cross species. I thought within the same species it tends to be reversed (e.g. Smaller dog breeds live longer than big ones). Here's an unscientific article with a footnote that shorter people tend to live longer: http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=49358
What you say is true, but the proposal is to reduce the height of the human species as a whole. Thus the cross-species comparison might be applicable here (i.e. humans at their current height vs. a smaller derived species).
Why 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.
Overcrowded? Ridiculous. Open up Google Maps. Switch on satellite view. Scroll around the planet. It's all empty space. Sure, we need to stop using carbon fuels. Yes, we need to stop polluting the oceans. But the earth is practically empty.
Switching power sources is the actual problem. And let's choose one that's also cheaper and more plentiful. Most of the other problems can be overcome with more and cheaper energy (like water for example).
But it's ludicrous to say the earth is nearly full.
Land is hardly the most limiting resource; in fact, it's well down the list, below:
- fresh water
- food
- waste carrying capacity (waterways, atmosphere)
- physical resources (metals, wood, concrete, oil and other energy forms)
A better source of energy solves any limitations on water and food. And "waste carrying capacity" is another term for pollution - as I said there are better ways to manage pollution.
Yes that takes technology, but the problem is mismanagement of resources, we aren't running out.
"The situation we’re in isn’t a looming wall that we’re doomed to crash into. It’s a race – a race between depletion and pollution of natural resources on one side, and our pace of innovation on the other."
The problem isn't physically occupying space, it's resource consumption. Humans themselves don't consume much space in total - the entire 2010 population could 'stand on zanzibar', as the book title predicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar#Title
>The most extreme examples are in Japan, where mean height has increased 5.5 inches in the last 50 years,
If you want to stay small, do what the japanese did pre-war, that made them so small: Sit on your soles.
>“If you were that small,” he says, “you’d be eaten by cats!”
Here is a picture from 1956 of Henry Behrens, the smallest man in the world at the time, dancing with his cat. He was 75 cm, 50% lager than the envisioned 50cms.
It mostly is. But sitting on your soles does change the proportion of your feet. I (and I think most other people) can't do that because my lower leg is too long.
Do you have a cite for that? I know plenty of people of various heights who can sit on the soles of their feet, it just uses muscles that most westerners don't exercise. I'm also pretty skeptical that it would affect your height in any way to do it regularly.
> Liao would accomplish this height reduction through pre-implantation diagnosis, a screening test used to determine whether genetic or chromosomal disorders are present in developing embryos before they are inserted into mothers through in vitro procedures. While height would be somewhat trickier to test than most hereditary diseases—it is controlled by 697 genetic variants, in contrast to the single variant of a hereditary disease like cystic fibrosis—Liao views this as a mere “technical problem.”
> Once science works out the kinks, he says, parents could screen for tallness just like they do now for disease.
He proposes aborting perfectly healthy embryos because they might grow up to be taller than he thinks people ought to be. I suppose it would implicitly require that all pregnancies be initiated through IVF, as well. What is this guy, the inverse of Khan Noonian Singh?
I suggest that Mr. Hendriks, "a 6" 4’ [sic] Dutchman," lead by example.
I can't tell if this is a Swiftian modest proposal or an earnest but ridiculously impractical idea, but this bit got me:
> Liao has calculated that reducing the average US height by just 8 percent (15 cm) would mean a corresponding mass reduction of 23 percent for men and 25 percent for women, and a 15-18 percent reduction of metabolic rate. The effect of this downscaling “is not linear,” he says. “It’s exponential.”
I think it's tongue-in-cheek or a publicity stunt. Among other problems, this would only increase the carrying capacity of our planet. It doesn't miraculously solve the problems of inevitable overpopulation or excessive consumption.
This is a laughably stupid idea. Trying to stay ahead of geometric growth is always a losing battle. Instead of turning humans to Smurfs, why don't we try to control the birth-rate instead.
Better yet, let's form a mega human from all normal sized humans. Things like terra-forming, deploying satellites, war, choosing what to watch on netflix would be easily solved. Birth control would be replaced by portion control.
33 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 79.7 ms ] threadIn the present study, the effects of pure isometric scaling on vertical jumping performance were investigated using a biologically realistic model of the human musculoskeletal system. The input of the model, muscle stimulation over time, was optimized using jump height as criterion. It was found that when the human model was miniaturized to the size of a mouse lemur, with a mass of about one-thousandth that of a human, jump height dropped from 40 cm to only 6 cm, mainly because of the force-velocity relationship. In reality, mouse lemurs achieve jump heights of about 33 cm
Is some academic trying to bolster the social visibility section of their grant application for research into human height determinants?
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.
Switching power sources is the actual problem. And let's choose one that's also cheaper and more plentiful. Most of the other problems can be overcome with more and cheaper energy (like water for example).
But it's ludicrous to say the earth is nearly full.
Heck, there's even a worsening shortage of sand suitable for construction use, worldwide: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/opinion/why-sand-is-disapp...
Yes that takes technology, but the problem is mismanagement of resources, we aren't running out.
"The situation we’re in isn’t a looming wall that we’re doomed to crash into. It’s a race – a race between depletion and pollution of natural resources on one side, and our pace of innovation on the other."
- http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-limits-of...
Volume of a human = 67 l [1]
Double this for packing errors = 134 l = .134 ㎥
.134 x 7.13 billion = 955,000,000 ㎥
< 1 ㎦
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+a+human+being
If you want to stay small, do what the japanese did pre-war, that made them so small: Sit on your soles.
>“If you were that small,” he says, “you’d be eaten by cats!”
Here is a picture from 1956 of Henry Behrens, the smallest man in the world at the time, dancing with his cat. He was 75 cm, 50% lager than the envisioned 50cms.
https://kittybloger.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/26th-october...
> Liao would accomplish this height reduction through pre-implantation diagnosis, a screening test used to determine whether genetic or chromosomal disorders are present in developing embryos before they are inserted into mothers through in vitro procedures. While height would be somewhat trickier to test than most hereditary diseases—it is controlled by 697 genetic variants, in contrast to the single variant of a hereditary disease like cystic fibrosis—Liao views this as a mere “technical problem.”
> Once science works out the kinks, he says, parents could screen for tallness just like they do now for disease.
He proposes aborting perfectly healthy embryos because they might grow up to be taller than he thinks people ought to be. I suppose it would implicitly require that all pregnancies be initiated through IVF, as well. What is this guy, the inverse of Khan Noonian Singh?
I suggest that Mr. Hendriks, "a 6" 4’ [sic] Dutchman," lead by example.
> Liao has calculated that reducing the average US height by just 8 percent (15 cm) would mean a corresponding mass reduction of 23 percent for men and 25 percent for women, and a 15-18 percent reduction of metabolic rate. The effect of this downscaling “is not linear,” he says. “It’s exponential.”
Face palm.