Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Enigmatic Entity on October 01, 2010, 12:19:48 am
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...what kind of technological advancements would occur, what things wouldn't work, evolution, territorial/space issues, etc.
Discuss ;)
I'd reckon internal combustion engines may not even exist except for very big applications if humans were small...
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*cough*SquareCubeLaw*cough*
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nano-tech would be 10x easier if we were 10x bigger, also computers would be a lot smaller relitivly.
machines would be a lot more efficient if we were 10x smaller, because of the afore mentioned SquareCubeLaw.
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10x smaller = dinner for wolves
10x bigger = we better have had colonized space long ago or the Earth would be stripped of raw materials and we'd all be dead.
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*cough*SquareCubeLaw*cough*
Yeah, we would die if the scaling were direct.
nano-tech would be 10x easier if we were 10x bigger, also computers would be a lot smaller relitivly.
machines would be a lot more efficient if we were 10x smaller, because of the afore mentioned SquareCubeLaw.
I don't think any of this is right. The size of these technological artifacts is dictated by design necessity, not the users, correct?
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What I would do? Smurf the smurfing smurf out of you!
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If humans were 10x larger then we'd have really awesome sex.
Edit: Lol, now I can't get T-REX sex out of my head
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Biggier would mean livestock wouldn't go as far in a bacon double cheeseburger. We'd need to increase farming. Cds would hold more data if they were the diameter of oxford circus too.
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I don't think any of this is right. The size of these technological artifacts is dictated by design necessity, not the users, correct?
Design necessity comes from human scale. Designing a chair means human scale ergonomics. Sure you can make a statically sound chair that's 10x bigger or smaller but it would be useless. Also, terms like "big" or "small" are a matter of perception, which would be different if we were 10x bigger or smaller. We tend to take ourselves as a reference point when determining if something's big or small.
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Screw stepping on ants, you'd have to worry about stepping on elephants.
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I don't think any of this is right. The size of these technological artifacts is dictated by design necessity, not the users, correct?
Design necessity comes from human scale. Designing a chair means human scale ergonomics. Sure you can make a statically sound chair that's 10x bigger or smaller but it would be useless. Also, terms like "big" or "small" are a matter of perception, which would be different if we were 10x bigger or smaller. We tend to take ourselves as a reference point when determining if something's big or small.
That's a good argument for chairs, but not for nanotechnology or machine efficiency.
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This topic is relevant to my interests.
10 x mass or 10 x dimensions?
With ten times the mass, we would be 10^1/3 larger than currently (that's 2.15 times taller). A 1.80 m tall individual would, if he had a mass increase by a factor of ten, tower at 3.87 metres of altitude.
To cope with the increased body mass, Either our bone density or cross-section area would need to be enlarged by factor of ten to counter the ten times larger body mass and the following dynamic force increases (for example, either bone radius increases by factor of 10^2/3, or 4.64, or bone density or mineral strengths (yield, compressive, tensile, shear and impact stresses all need to be much stronger). Tendons and muscles would need to be either scaled up or powered up significantly to provide reliable and swift locomotion and balance. The attachment points of tendons to bones would need to either have higher torque (further from the joints) or be much much thicker and stronger. In short words we wouldn't look much like humans.
I also shudder to think of the stresses that our knees, ankles, hip joints and most importantly the spine would be subjected to.
Increase of blood pressure would be required, and subsequently a re-write of most tissues because you can't just supersize cells, you need to increase their amount, so basically you would need an overhaul of cardio-pulmonary system as well as digestive system and nervous system.
Speaking of that, your brain is now ten times more massive. But if it were just upscaled model, you wouldnt' get any benefits - except ten times larger energy consumption. Which is another issue - we would have (approximately) ten times higher basic metabolism and probably significantly higher stress metabolism. Thermal balance would also change - it would be more difficult to regulate our temperatures in hot areas, because our surface area to body mass ratio would be significantly smaller. So we would require additional cooling systems as well. In short, most of our cooling happens through skin; now our body mass is ten times the current one but our skin surface has only increased by a factor of 4.64, so that's almost half the reduction in our ability to expel a given percentage of our thermal energy. That means strenuous activity would risk thermal shock in much lower temperatures than currently. We would need about ten times as much liquid too.
And remember - this has been calculated with the (more sensible) option of having our bady mass increase to tenfold of current.
I'm not even going to go into how ridiculous it would be to think of ten times taller than current humans. 18 metres tall human would have 1000 times the mass of 1.8 metres tall, proportionally similar human.
If the original human had body mass of 80 kg, the supersized version would have body mass of 80 tons.
That's ****ing insane considering that a good-sized humpback whale is about 18 metres tall and has body mass of about 40-48 tonnes, and they're water animals. The largest present day land animal, African bull elephant, has a record weight of 11 tons, and the largest land animals ever (I'm using the Argentinosaurus here because they seem to have the most amount of evidence supporting their claim) had length of around 35 m and estimated body mass of 80-100 tons, so that's what you would be aiming at with your super human.
Incidentally, this is why I find humanoid mechas a rather humorous concept.
No wonder the Evangelion units had such short operational times without the umbilical chord... or S2 organ... :nervous: But then again, compared to the hostile Angels appearing in the series, the EVA's are positively rational and realistic. :p
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I don't think any of this is right. The size of these technological artifacts is dictated by design necessity, not the users, correct?
a big limiting factor in those two fields is the atomic limit,you cannot make a transistor smaller than an atom, and you cannot make a gear smaller than about 100 atoms.
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I don't think any of this is right. The size of these technological artifacts is dictated by design necessity, not the users, correct?
a big limiting factor in those two fields is the atomic limit,you cannot make a transistor smaller than an atom, and you cannot make a gear smaller than about 100 atoms.
Yes, precisely. So I don't think changing the sizes of the organisms developing it would make a difference.
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Kinda missed you were talking about nanotech. My mistake.
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it would change the relative size of the products compared the organisms using them.
humans would be 10x as big but the computers and nano machines would be about the same size or not too far behind.
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My bet is we would be dead in both cases, due to lesser adaptability to different environments.