The Case for Making Humans Smaller

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.”

Face palm.

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.

>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.

https://kittybloger.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/26th-october...

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.

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.

Napoleon!

This is utter insanity:

> 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.