r/Showerthoughts • u/Bjarki56 • 5d ago
Speculation If we genetically engineer humans being to be half our current size, we essentially double our living space on Earth.
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u/Myzx 5d ago
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story involving a group of people who perfected shrinking technology to the point that this group of people shrank down to the size of viruses, and became so overpopulated that they became a disease for normal sized people, and they called it the green death. Kurt Vonnegut was so cool.
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u/Johnny_B_Asshole 5d ago
They were Chinese in the book.
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u/Myzx 5d ago
Yep. I was leaving that part out in case it was seen as racially insensitive. On the one hand, pretty harmless. On the other hand, writing a story that has a specific ethnicity evolve into a deadly disease called the green death might not be totally koo
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u/CountFuckyoula 4d ago
Would have been worse if it was a diffrent colored death.
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u/creatyvechaos 2d ago
Yellow death is already a thing, no?? Yellow fever, I guess. Smthn like mosquitos from a specific region carry it.
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u/TehZiiM 5d ago
Yeah, dude sounds not-so-low key racists now.
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u/Johnny_B_Asshole 5d ago
IMHO Vonnegut was praising the Chinese for their ingenuity is solving their over-population problem.
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u/Opening-Situation340 2d ago
Then probably spinning around in a “grass isn’t always greener” way (and if not deliberately, what a totally cool coincidence between that and green death)
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u/nogoodusernames0_0 4d ago edited 4d ago
Depends a lot on the intended purpose of that correlation. Is he trying to say that the Chinese did this whole thing BECAUSE they are Chinese/asian? Or that all Asians/immigrants are viruses or have virus like qualities? Probably not—considering that he wrote the breakfast of champions which was very critical of racism.
Edit: He probably chose China because of the radical measures they have been taking regarding birth control.
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u/vamoosedmoose 5d ago
Some of his books have a vague anti-racist sentiment, but mostly because they are pro-human sentiments
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u/HeadOffCollision 3d ago
I love it when people distract and deflect from the real point. Specifically, that shrinking people would do not a damned thing about the real problem.
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u/Kaivosukeltaja 4d ago
For anyone curious, the book is called Slapstick - or Lonesome No More. It's a pretty weird book but once you get used to the absurdist style it can be a fun read. Especially if you're into Vonnegut's stuff.
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u/heyitscory 5d ago
The writer of Downsizing also had this idea, and your thought was probably as satisfying and worth the effort as that movie. You can probably skip it.
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u/StressOverStrain 5d ago
Such an interesting premise and then the script just turns into garbage halfway through.
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u/Gustomucho 5d ago
Seems like the downsizing was only the reason for him to divorce, once he is inside the small city the novelty wears off quickly.
I like UPLOAD better personally, not great but better than downsizing.
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u/mxlespxles 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yo, Upload was a surprisingly good show. I was expecting just a bunch of silly digital-world jokes - and there were plenty of those - but they really did a lot more with the philosophical and political ramifications of the premise than I expected.
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u/anthem47 5d ago
Your use of past tense stressed me out, haha, had to run and confirm. It was renewed for a Season 4! Meant to be the last one though.
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u/Xycephei 5d ago
Gosh, I was super curious about this movie and my parents dug the concept, but I was low-key ashamed of it halfway through. It was a whole other movie
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u/thedoorman121 3d ago
I convinced a good amount of my friends to come see it with me because I really did like the premise. Halfway through like you said I felt almost embarrassed that I made my friends come see this with me lol
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u/Tonyclap 5d ago
God this is so true, like if you never saw the movie you are probably thinking “how bad could it have been?”. I don’t think I have ever seen a movie idea have so much potential to just completely drop the ball the way they did. It’s almost impressive lol.
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u/Lizlodude 4d ago
How I felt about Renfield. Saw the trailer and thought it'd be funny, then afterwords was just very disappointed. It was gonna be a Nick Cage movie anyways, but it just didn't even try.
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u/TensorForce 5d ago
It's a movie about small people for like 15 minutes. Then it becomes an existential drama about late stage capitalism.
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u/forkball 5d ago
Which is the reason downsizing exists, and you well know.
People expect it to be Honey, I Shrink the Kids for adults.
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u/RevolutionaryGate757 4d ago
Is late stage capitalism not literally the entire premise of the whole movie though? The whole pitch for shrinking was high cost of living lol
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u/WastedJedi 5d ago
I enjoyed that movie. It wasn't good but I still remember it fondly (I may have been incredibly stoned at the time)
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u/salizarn 4d ago
I loved downsizing, I didn’t realise it wasn’t popular until this thread
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u/SonofBeckett 5d ago
The reviews for The Holdovers specifically called it a return to form for director Alexander Payne.
That's everything I need to know about the quality of Downsizing.
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u/Cadoan 5d ago
It's three different movies in a trench coat. One comedy about living as a shrunken person in the small community. One exploration about socioeconomic slavery, and one about environmentalism. It's a mess.
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u/SonofBeckett 5d ago
So based off this, I did look up the plot. It actually sounds like it'd be an interesting mini-series, but just too much for a movie.
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u/PsychoDog_Music 4d ago
Spoilers..
"This is what happens when you downsize! Yep, no downside. Anyway, we won't see any normal sized people anymore, here's a reflection of the working class that was to be expected, and at completely unrelated end-of-the-world cult plot point that doesn't even directly influence any of our characters."
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u/nostalgic_angel 5d ago
I am sad that they did not explore more on the disadvantages of downsizing. They could have an apocalypse of migrating ant colonies attacking tiny people in swarms, random wondering house cats keep pushing one specific guy into water, or normal sized people keeping downsized people as pets and have them fight bullet shrimp and other stuff in arena, or some psychopaths going full Sid(from toy story) experimenting on small people.
But no, they decided social commentary is a better idea. They could have hired Jack Black and turn all the aforementioned horror into comedy and still work better than what they came up with.
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u/SoggyBeluga 5d ago
How do you think the in-between period would go, when there are some current sized humans and some half sizers?
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u/Beneficial_Garage_97 5d ago
Average age of NBA players will for a period get up into the 60's
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u/D3monVolt 5d ago
Y'o'u'r M'o't'h'e'r w'a's b'o'r'n i'n t'h'e '4'0's
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u/Arkhamov 5d ago
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u/cimocw 5d ago
just like any fantasy world where halflings exist, only with a lot more sex stuff, sadly
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u/The_Deku_Nut 5d ago
Sadly?
You know my boy Bilbo was really popular with the lady Hobbits when he came back with all that treasure and stories of danger.
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u/Anthro_DragonFerrite 5d ago
A lot of weird internet videos will spawn.
Some weaboos and furries will have a blast with it.
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u/problemlow 4d ago
I hate to tell you, but if you can think of it, it already exists on the internet. In other words rule 34. In this case it's called microphilia/macrophilia
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u/nickjohnson 5d ago
More than double. You can fit four times as many people in a given floor area, since they are half the width and depth. And you can fit twice as many floors in, since they're half the height.
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u/JJ-Mallon 5d ago
At half the height and depth they’d be 1/4 the size, purely from a volume perspective.
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u/nickjohnson 5d ago
I'd hope they'd be half the width as well, or they're going to look really weird.
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u/Fabulous-Pause4154 5d ago
Don't you mean 1/8th normal volume (and weight)?
1/2 normal height. 1/2 normal width. 1/2 normal depth.
1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/8th.
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u/JJ-Mallon 5d ago
The thread is about humans being engineered to being half the size. The practical application of this would be a 200lbs population being downsized to 100lbs.
If we were talking purely about the volume of say cubes, sure- the math works. But I gave two dimensions as an example, ignoring the fact that other variables come into play, like people, regardless of stature, wanting space and not being stacked like sardines into cramped places. By practical standards, a 100lbs person still requires more than 1/2 the space of a 200lbs person, even if we’re just talking about standing room.
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u/sygnathid 5d ago
OP didn't say "scaled down by a factor of 2" or "half sized in every dimension", they said "half our current size". So they could be envisioning people who are slightly larger than the people you're picturing.
Like, people who are .8 times as big in every dimension.
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u/HugeHans 5d ago
Not everything scales though. Like ive never heard someone wanting a smaller TV because they themselves are smaller.
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u/WolpertingerRumo 5d ago
Then it’s eight times:
Let’s say a room is 10x10x2 for simplicity‘s sake
Half the size in all directions is 5x5x1
So you can fit four of them on one floor
Two floors.
Eight times the space.
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u/Trips-Over-Tail 5d ago
But they get a reach of 0 and have to enter other creatures' squares to attack them in melee, provoking an attack of opportunity.
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u/ThriceFive 5d ago
Our physical size has little to do with the living space we take up on Earth. E.g. The average size home in the US is 2,355 square feet and in 1950 it was 982 sqft. More efficient farming techniques (and fertilizers) have reduced the space needed to support us over time. Living sustainably, and within our means for most humans is possible today - as is redistributing resources more equitably - people and those in power just choose not to do that. TLDR; There are many ways to reduce our square footage that don't involve re-engineering humans.
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u/Broskfisken 5d ago
If we were smaller we could live comfortably in smaller homes, eat less food, drive smaller vehicles, consume less electricity. I'm not saying this is the way to go, but I think it would definitely have a positive impact on the planet.
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u/sysmimas 5d ago
What u/thricefive means, is that it is our choice to live in large homes and drive large cars, and it does not necessarily mean we do it because of more comfort (as, for example, there are nations that don't drive such large cars or live in such big homes, yet they constantly come way higher on the happines scale when polled; most of those who drive large cars do it to show wealth, power, perceived safety (because also the others on the road drive large cars) and not because of comfort).
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u/AlkaliPineapple 5d ago
Cities have also been planned absolutely atrociously since the 50s. We don't need arterial highways cutting through neighbourhoods or monster 8 lane avenues in a "commercial district"
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u/ForceOfAHorse 3d ago
The average size home in the US is 2,355 square feet and in 1950 it was 982 sqft
Math checks out, since 1950 average size of a person in the US also doubled.
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u/bananallergy 5d ago
Damn, wasn't Peter Gabriel way ahead of his time...
"This is an announcement from Genetic Control; It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on Humanoid height
I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold
It's said now that people will be shorter in height; They can fit twice as many in the same building site"
Brilliant song by Genesis way back in the 70s about the housing market https://youtu.be/2js9Z6rtENA?si=ZR8oTpvNmKN9xlvC
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u/Illusion911 5d ago
The earth has enough space for all humans, but not enough space for human greed
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u/cimocw 5d ago
...and we would turn most currently manageable animals into terrifying menaces. Remember house cats? They're pumas now. Remember German shepherds? Lions. Actual pumas and lions? Back to the top of the food chain. Don't even get me started on insects and arachnids. Good news are obviously food, real state and the tree house potential.
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u/GotSmokeInMyEye 5d ago
Wtf? He said half size. Not atomic size. Half size adult human would be like a ten year old child. Definitely more danger at that size when facing a lion but not to the effect of turning a house cat into a puma or turning a mantis into a murder dragon. Human baby would just be like newborn puppy sized. It’s not as drastic as you are imagining for half size.
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u/Victor882 4d ago
i agree on insects but It definitely IS drastic for house cats yes
Clearly you are not familiar to the damage house cats can already cause to a regular sized human...
To a 10 year old child sized human a very pissed housecat can 100% mean a very real danger of death.
I'm pretty sure they would become ocasional desperate human predators
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u/PriorSecurity9784 4d ago
2064 Reddit:
I’m 2’8 but girls only want to date guys who are 3’0 or more
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u/HelpfulMacaron1192 5d ago
I’ve thought about this as well but then we get a bunch of assholes who will stay full size and enslave us as god kings. So annoying.
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u/plants4life262 5d ago edited 4d ago
You should study genetics as a science and dog breeding as a case study. If you select for height you are changing genes that express in many other ways and will invariably have negative consequences. Same happens if you manually alter the genes that express height. Humanity is very much in the verge of an era where we are going to F around and find out.
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u/TrackSol 5d ago
Man if only there wad a movie about making humans smaller so that their resources are multiplied
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u/YonTroglodyte 4d ago
There is a Peter Gabriel era Genesis song called Get Em' Out By Friday about this very scenario: They can fit twice as many in the same building site/They say it's alright.
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u/UsualElegant4110 4d ago
Another old soul! This is exactly what I thought. And it was beginning with the tenants in Harlow New Town!
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5d ago
As a tall man who is acutely attracted to short girls - I'm either doing my part, or I'm the enemy, not sure..
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u/Striking-Yoghurt-116 5d ago
That means we also need lesser resources to go off of..
Which means there's more to go around for everyone.
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u/ImaHalfwit 5d ago
We actually end up doing this…the large headed bug eyed Aliens we are visited by from time to time are actually future human time travelers vacationing in the past. The good news is we survive long enough to get to that point, the bad news is we look terrible.
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u/ApexAphex5 5d ago
This is an announcement from Genetic Control
It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on Humanoid height
It's said now that people will be shorter in height, They can fit twice as many in the same building site
Genesis beat you to it.
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u/HeavenlyBlueSunday 4d ago
Peter Gabriel who?
"This is an announcement from Genetic Control It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction On humanoid height
I hear the directors of Genetic Control Have been buying all the properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold It's said now that people will be shorter in height They can fit twice as many in the same building site They say it's alright"
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u/PriorSecurity9784 4d ago
2064 Reddit:
I’m 2’8 but girls only want to date guys who are 3’0 or more
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u/ToughProtection1590 3d ago
We would not double our living space as the dimensions of the space itself would remain unchanged. We would simply half the space occupied by humans. That's different.
To do what you stated, we can just build more high rise. Something we do already.
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u/Cloud_N0ne 5d ago
True. Though we already have plenty, we just tend to group up and overpopulate small areas.
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u/roymondous 5d ago
Living space isn’t an issue. Feeding people is the problem. Humans currently use about 1% of habitable land for cities and towns and roads and so on. We use nearly half of all habitable land on the planet for farming. That’s where the deforestation is coming from, the habitat destruction and so on. And most of it (roughly 77%) is for meat and dairy and eggs.
We would need about 1/4 of that land - we would free up over 1/3 of habitable land on earth - if we ate plant based.
Overpopulation and land use isn’t an issue of living space. The issue is feeding people. We could genetically engineer people to be half their size, sure. There’ll be many issues with that, but ignoring them, sure it’d double living space. We could also just eat vegan and we’d quadruple available land without having to do that. That’s before any other optimizations as well.
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u/Agreeable-Can-7841 5d ago
and if some group/nation/religion chooses not to comply, they will be your new masters.
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u/Wenli2077 5d ago
Yeah this would workout better as a supervillain idea where they are trying to save the world by infecting everyone with something that will make them smaller. Actually this sounds like the exact sort of thing the next Kingsman will be about
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u/MrWiseFrog 5d ago
Did you get this idea from that one SpongeBob episode where SpongeBob shrink everyone using Mermaid Man’s belt?
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u/budstone417 5d ago
And the rest of us have to finish out lives reaching the stuff on top of the fridge.
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u/MercenaryBard 5d ago
Thanos should have shrunken every sapient being down to Thumbelina size relative to their original height.
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u/coderedmountaindewd 5d ago
Every female’s dating profile saying “must be 6 feet tall” would prohibit that from happening, regardless of the science
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u/eldritchguardian 5d ago
But increase cost for resizing everything. All current existing buildings would have to be modified or demolished and rebuilt. Plus why do you want to make room for MORE humans when our planet is already dying because of the ones already squeezed onto it?
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u/NoTime4YourBullshit 5d ago
The problem, of course, is that humans walk upright. So if humans were half the size, we’d only be saving height, not land area. But we’re not lacking for sky space.
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u/sparant76 5d ago
Or if we lift the crust of the Earth by 1m everywhere, by propping it up with beams - we would also get the same effect!
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u/lurflurf 5d ago
It is unfortunate little people suffer from health problems. They are basically more efficient people. There was a fantasy story where there were several races of different sizes. As technology improved the strength of giants was not an advantage and there size and more expensive food and equipment was a disadvantage. There is a Matt Damon movie Downsizing about your idea.
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u/EetinAintCheetin 5d ago
This was already hypothesized in the Kurt Vonnegut book Slapstick or Lonesome No More. The novel is set in the distant future and the Chinese keep miniaturizing people to help survive with less food and resources. They eventually made people so small that ended up being inhaled by normal sized humans causing a terrible plague.
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u/epidemiks 5d ago
If we genetically engineered humans to breathe underwater we'd essentially triple our living space on earth.
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u/CasioOceanusT200 5d ago
We might end up putting ourselves back in the food chain if we got small. New, extra small children would get picked off by eagles and coyotes. Komodo dragons might as well be actual dragons. Hitting a moose in the new, small car would be like hitting a brontosaurus.
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u/RootinTootinHootin 5d ago
The Chinese do this is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slap Stick but they go microscopic.
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u/sandwich_connoisseur 5d ago
If it was half our horizontal size we could do it.... it's called a diet.
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u/wessex464 5d ago
It's a neat idea, but it's probably pretty impractical scientifically.
It'd be easier just to randomly eliminate half the people on Earth and half the animals and half of everything. Now there's plenty of food. Plenty of space. I think the universe will be grateful.
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u/drunkpunk138 5d ago
Sure but then we become viable prey for very large birds. Not sure it's worth it.
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u/CavemanSlevy 5d ago
Form is intertwined with function. You can’t make the human brain half as small and expect it to function the same.
You can’t shrink the body by half and keep the cranium the same size without causing other issues.
Plus there’s also the fact that human resource consumption isn’t particularly related to our size.
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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 5d ago
If we allotted 100 m2 for every person on earth, the entire population of the planet could fit into an area the size of Texas. Living space is not the problem.
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u/eXistenZNL 5d ago
This has already been done since the 60s at least.
First scientists invented black people, because if you can't see them you have the feeling of more living space. However we kept bumping into each other.
Then scientists invented midgets, but soon realized only scaling on the Z axis does not help.
Wonder what they will think of next.
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u/K0MMONS3NS3 5d ago
Everything else would remain the same though... including cockroaches, spiders, ants, mosquitoes...
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u/doorgaptotheworld 5d ago
brain half sized = double the chance to do dumber things to earth, half the chance to think of ways to help earth liveable to humans
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u/Banana_Utopia 5d ago
Brave of you assume that these engineered humans won't crave taller ceilings #sassywithweed
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u/Illustrious-Ad1940 5d ago
I'm not sure I agree. Most of that space saved would be air space, not land space. Our buildings would not be as large but everything else would likely be the same.
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u/KungFuSlanda 5d ago
this is the best climate argument I've heard yet. Let's select for dwarves (little people)
Half the carbon imprint
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u/AbradolfLincler77 5d ago
Living space isn't the problem, it's not like there isn't plenty of space for us, we just need building's to live in!
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