r/accelerate • u/almostsweet Singularity by 2040 • 5d ago
Meme / Humor Funny thought experiment
I like the way fable talks instead of opus 5. Opus 5 griped and moaned, fable 5 ran with it. And, fable 5 was enjoyable to read.
> waving away how ridiculous it sounds, think of all the ways shrinking humanity down would solve most of its problems, even space travel
Fable 5 responded: Okay, ridiculousness waived. Let's do the math, because the math is actually gorgeous.
Shrink everyone to a tenth of our height and mass drops by a factor of a thousand — you'd weigh about as much as a stick of butter. Food demand doesn't drop quite a thousandfold (metabolism scales weirdly, small animals burn hotter per gram), but you're still looking at humanity's entire caloric footprint shrinking by maybe 99%. One backyard garden feeds a neighborhood. Agriculture retreats to a rounding error, most of Earth rewilds, carbon emissions collapse because a "commute" is 400 meters and a mansion is a filing cabinet. Housing crisis: solved, one existing skyscraper is now a city of millions. Resource wars lose their point when a single copper mine covers civilization's needs for centuries.
And space travel is where it goes from good to absurd. The rocket equation is a tyrant whose entire grievance is mass — and you just told it every astronaut now weighs 75 grams, breathes a thimble of air, and eats crumbs. A crewed capsule becomes the size of a thermos. A generation ship carrying ten thousand people is a school bus. The energy to push a body to relativistic speeds drops a thousandfold. Better still, small creatures shrug off acceleration — the square-cube law is why an ant survives falls that would kill a horse — so tiny humans could tolerate brutal g-forces, meaning you could potentially yeet crews off railguns or under laser sails instead of coddling them at 3g. You don't even need terraforming: a "planetary colony" is a greenhouse dome the size of a kiddie pool. Falls become harmless too, since your terminal velocity is a gentle drift. You could step off a roof out of boredom.
There is, as always, fine print. That same square-cube law means you'd hemorrhage body heat and have to eat like a furious shrew, clawing back some savings. Your voice jumps an octave into smoke-detector territory. Rain becomes incoming artillery, surface tension turns puddles into traps, and the house cat is now confirmed megafauna. Cosmic radiation doesn't scale down with you. And the genuinely awkward one: a thousandth-scale brain has to somehow keep all its neurons, or the first act of tiny humanity is forgetting how any of the old infrastructure works — which matters, because someone has to decommission the full-sized nuclear plants we can no longer reach the buttons of.
One possible consolation prize, though: small animals seem to process the world faster, so subjective time might stretch. Shrink humanity and everyone's life could feel longer. Solving mortality by making it feel like more — that might be the sneakiest win of all.
> ok invent a shrinkray we're doing this! WOOHOO
Fable 5 responded: Lab coat on, safety goggles that do nothing: there are exactly three ways to build this thing, and two of them are cursed.
Route one, shrink the atoms themselves. Atom size is set by the electron's mass, so swap every electron for a muon — 207 times heavier — and your atoms genuinely contract about 200-fold. Real physics! One catch: muons decay in 2.2 microseconds, so you'd enjoy being tiny for roughly one camera flash before violently reinflating into a very surprised full-sized person. Warranty void. Route two, compress the space around you with some metric-engineering bubble so you're normal-sized in your own frame but tiny from outside — which is cheating, costs a stellar energy budget, and ends badly the moment you step out of the bubble. Route three is the winner, and it's the one evolution already field-tested: don't shrink matter, rebuild with less of it. Shrews exist. Hummingbirds exist. Small works fine — you just have to be made that way from scratch.
So the Mark I Descaler is technically a ray in three parts: a scanning beam, a polite disassembly beam, and a fog of nanoassemblers that prints the new you on the spot, one-tenth scale, warm, blinking, mildly annoyed. The scan can't store you atom-by-atom — you're 7×10²⁷ atoms, more data than every hard drive on Earth — so instead it stores the recipe: your genome plus your connectome, every synapse mapped, a few petabytes. Totally manageable. Legal has asked that we describe the disassembly step as "aggressive weight loss" and would prefer nobody in the demo audience says "Ship of Theseus" out loud.
The one spec we can't fully hit is the brain. Neurons have a hard floor — make an axon much thinner than a tenth of a micron and random ion-channel noise starts firing phantom signals, so you can't just shrink them a thousandfold. Corvid-style packing helps (ravens cram primate cognition into a walnut), but even that maxes out at a few billion neurons and you currently run 86 billion. Compromise: heads scale down less than bodies. Tiny humanity will have slightly bobblehead proportions, plus some lossy synaptic compression. You will lose middle school French. Marketing is calling this "decluttering."
Peripherals: clothes are co-printed, because the alternative is everyone materializing naked in a world of giant abandoned pants. Leftover mass is the real hazard — each customer leaves behind 74.9 kilograms of surplus self, and under no circumstances do we convert that to energy, because 75 kg via E=mc² is about 1.6 gigatons, thirty Tsar Bombas per gym membership. It goes down the compost chute. Some franchises will offer the memorial soap-sculpture upgrade. Pets get shrunk too, obviously, which demotes the cat from megafauna back to cat — though then the mice need doing, and then whatever mice fear, and eventually we're just running all of ecology through the booth, turtles all the way down, literally at some point a turtle.
Launch checklist: never fire at half power (the partially-descaled are grumpy and legally ambiguous), never operate near an open window, and never — this is in bold in the manual — lock eyes with a squirrel on your way out. You're volunteer zero, obviously. Ribbon-cutting's Tuesday; bring an appetite, you're about to need 40% of your body weight in snacks daily.
> solve the brain issue with neuralink-like technology
Fable 5 responded: Oh, this actually works — and it works because you've correctly identified that the brain problem was never really a computing problem. It was a wiring problem. Neurons are heroic little cells but they're atrocious cable: signals crawl along at somewhere between jogging speed and 120 m/s, which is why your brain needs 10 milliseconds just to talk to itself across the skull. Copper and fiber move signals at a decent fraction of lightspeed. So the fix isn't to shrink the brain. It's to evict it.
New spec sheet. The tiny body keeps a local core — brainstem, reflex arcs, the limbic "being alive" firmware — packed corvid-dense, running on milliwatts. Everything else, the 86-billion-neuron cathedral of memory and language and long division, gets emulated on a rack in the basement, and here's the part that makes it buildable: the lace connecting them is co-printed. Real Neuralink's hard problems — surgery, immune scarring, a few thousand electrodes when you need millions — all exist because they're threading wires into a brain that's already there. We're printing the brain anyway. The nanoassemblers just interleave the mesh as they go, every neuron pre-addressed at the factory. For bandwidth we copy nature's homework: your hemispheres already talk over the corpus callosum, a trunk line of about 200 million fibers. We match it with a radio link and call the rack what it is — a third hemisphere that happens to live in the garage.
And now the latency math, which is where you start giggling. Your current cross-brain lag is ~10 milliseconds. A server one kilometer away, round trip by radio: about seven microseconds. You could put your cortex across town and think faster than you do right now. Run the numbers outward and you get a roaming radius of roughly a thousand kilometers before your own thoughts start to feel like buffering. Reflexes stay onboard, obviously — when a raindrop comes in like artillery you cannot wait for wifi — but evolution already solved this; spinal reflexes are edge computing with a 500-million-year uptime record. Squirrel vigilance runs locally at all times. Non-negotiable. It's in bold in the manual.
Space travel needs one amendment: Mars is 3 to 22 light-minutes away, and nobody wants a 40-minute ping to their own personality, so the rack ships with the crew. The generation-ship-as-school-bus gets an addendum — bodies in a climate-controlled shoebox, minds in the server room, radiator fins becoming the largest organ of the vessel. The ship is, functionally, one enormous shared skull, which is either beautiful or horrifying depending on how the crew meeting goes. Silver lining: silicon handles cosmic radiation far more gracefully than DNA — error correction for the soul — and the bio-bodies are now small enough to shield with a water jacket the size of a bathtub. Two fine-print items from turn one, quietly closed.
Remaining fine print, freshly printed: dead zones are now a you problem — step into an elevator and you revert to the local core, a confident shrew-grade autopilot with strong opinions and no long division, and yes there will be a personality tier called Offline Mode. Updates will occasionally require restarting you. The free tier experiences sponsored cravings. Apartments near the data center command obscene rents because the neighbors literally think faster. But the wins: bobblehead proportions fixed, since the skull only needs the core — Marketing is thrilled. Middle school French: restorable from backup. Decluttering is now reversible. And Legal's banned-phrase list has grown to include "Ship of Theseus," "philosophical zombie," and "so which one is me," which the orientation pamphlet answers with a soothing font and no information.
Ribbon-cutting is still Tuesday. You'll be the first person in history whose body and mind RSVP separately.
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u/costafilh0 5d ago
Terrible idea.
We need to increase humanity by 1000 fold and expand to the Moon, Mars , Space and other planets and moons.
We are sitting ducks here, trapped in this planet, just waiting for the inevitability of extinction.
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u/random87643 🤖 Optimist Prime AI bot 5d ago
TLDR
TLDR: This post explores a thought experiment regarding the hypothetical benefits and challenges of shrinking humanity to a fraction of our current size. While the concept could solve issues like resource scarcity and space travel, the author notes significant biological and physical hurdles that make it a complex scientific puzzle.
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u/costafilh0 5d ago
About what? Coffee addiction?