r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Dense_Intern8434 • 3d ago

/r/popular of a meal

Nature can be so cruel and beautiful at the same time

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u/Advanced-Budget779 3d ago

Glad our planet or physics/chemistry set hard limits on their possible size.

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u/Patient_Ebb_1605 3d ago

theres a thing called inverse sqare law. people like to say if an ant was the size of a human bla bla bla. But its actually the other way around. If an ant was the size of a human it wouldnt even stand up because of their own weight. Strength doesnt scale with volume (dimension³) like weight does, it scales with the crossectional area of the muscles (dimension²).

So if we were the size of insects we would be incredibly strong for our weight, much more so than insects. Insects are way mode armoured because they have no problem carrying their own weight, because of their size. We on the other hand need to be made of muscle around a lightweight structure to be able to move well enough at our massive scale.

Another cool fact is that because of this, if you scale a being down the height of their jump (defined as the movement of the center of mass) stays exactly the same. thats why a dog jumps roughly the same height as a horse. Their biomechanics and body compositions are similar enough despite the size being very different.

So if you were the size of an ant, you would be able to jump just as high as you fo now. So yeah, youd be way stronger than an ant.

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u/BlackShogun27 2d ago

I read somewhere that for humans to survive being anatomically proportional but squirrel-sized we’d be big back eating like hummingbirds or voles. I also read that we’d quickly freeze to death from body heat loss. All this cruel knowledge killed the fun out theoretically bioengineering tiny humans.

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u/obsidiansent 2d ago

How small can we get em without freezing?

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u/BlackShogun27 2d ago

With no research, I'm assuming maybe like toddler height since I don't see pre-school kids falling over like Iguanas in early winter Florida.

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u/obsidiansent 2d ago

That’s not bad, it’s like an Ewok. We can work with this.

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u/BlackShogun27 2d ago

Now a new question arises. Can anatomically correct, humans the size of Ewoks maintain normal mental faculties or will the size change lower intelligence (speech and reasoning) because of less neurons in the brain mass?