Solving overpopulation with smaller humans?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Going about the day's busy work, I was struck by a thought: 7 billion humans is clearly too much of a strain on the world's resources, but it can easily handle trillions upon trillions of ants. Wouldn't we vastly increase our sustainable population if we engineered ourselves to be much smaller?



Jyoti Amge is an actress known for her role in American Horror Story and measures roughly 2 feet tall and weighs 11 lbs. Since she is not mentally deficient, she is proof that the human brain can retain its full function at such a reduced size. Imagine if all humans were her size, and how much fewer resources that would consume. The most obvious decrease in resources would come from food, which would suddenly be fantastic in its abundance, but it would also be trivial to build cheap and efficient aircraft if the passengers only weigh 11 lbs (even a set of artificial wings could probably do the trick). Houses could be the size of a walk-in closet, and space travel would suddenly become cheaper by orders of magnitude. When you think about it, the most major factor that makes our civilization's engineering challenges so difficult is that we're so damn big and heavy.

Aside from the need to shrink our pets (especially cats) and the question of what to do with the existing gigantic infrastructure, what would be the complications and challenges from solving overpopulation by engineering smaller people?

[Purple]

Forget infrastructure. Try farming when you can't reach the tip of your grains, rice paddies are a drowning hazard and that apple tree might as well be a mountain. And while we are at it try controlling pests such as rats now that they are proportionally the size of large dogs. Or you know, the large domestic dog population suddenly caught in a world of walking bite sized snacks.

The world economy would also quickly collapse as such small humans don't have the muscle power to effectively harvest the worlds resources. We would be unable to mine, cut down trees and perform other tasks efficiently. The muscle power just ain't there. So it's back to the stone age.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If we were to do such a thing, it would have to be gradual, over many generations, so that when we replace old infrastructure we can build it progressively smaller. Cutting us down to 2 feet is probably too far. but 4 foot? Maybe.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that if this would take generations to do, then by the time we've done it, either we've already beaten overpopulation or overpopulation's beaten us. It doesn't matter what solutions we have to overpopulation in 2200; we need to address the problem by 2050 or so.

[Eternal_Freedom]

True. It;s like building a Dyson shell or figuring out how to launch satellites by catapault, by the time we can do it we don't need to.

[puskas78]

Forget infrastructure. Try farming when you can't reach the tip of your grains,

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxV7gRa2IdA[/youtube]

rice paddies are a drowning hazard

"Amphibious" combine harvesters

and that apple tree might as well be a mountain.

Lots of climbing and ropes.
Or cutting the stalks with lasers.

And while we are at it try controlling pests such as rats now that they are proportionally the size of large dogs.

Knives and guns

Or you know, the large domestic dog population suddenly caught in a world of walking bite sized snacks.

Big dogs would be rare. But chihuahuas and toy dachshunds would be "normal sized" dogs. Ferrets would be more popular.

The world economy would also quickly collapse as such small humans don't have the muscle power to effectively harvest the worlds resources. We would be unable to mine, cut down trees and perform other tasks efficiently. The muscle power just ain't there. So it's back to the stone age.

Machines.

[Simon_Jester]

It's not that it would be physically impossible. It's that it would require a lot more heavy equipment and weapons and tools for these hypothetical tiny people to do things that we, today, routinely do without heavy equipment, weapons, or tools. Thus, even as reduced food and resource consumption drove the cost of keeping one human alive, the increased difficulty of producing and maintaining equipment would drive it back up.

In undeveloped countries (the same ones experiencing overpopulation in the near future), the consequences would be especially bad, because these countries cannot afford the luxury of buying expensive equipment like amphibious harvesters for rice paddies or whatever. So in the very places where a solution to overpopulation is most needed, making people tiny would be a poor solution to the problem.

[salm]

I think it would have to be done against the will of practically everybody. You won´t find many people who would willingly shrink their offspring as size is commonly seen as a positive trait.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

True, it would almost have to be an offshoot of survivalists who see the writing on the wall, Wayward Pines in miniature.

[Zaune]

This concept was part of the plot, such as it was, of a Micro Machines spinoff videogame.

That probably makes it a bad idea almost by default.