Shrinking

Does anyone remember the Tom Swift book about shrinking? Navigating a lawn at a height of 2cm, dodging insects and insect-sized robots. Or Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine? With the flying on butterflies and tossing around globes of ultra-viscous water? Delightful.

But there’s a problem. You can’t do that. Let’s say you hand-wave away the problems you’d have messing with the electromagnetic force and make electrons orbit closer to atomic nuclei. You’d have a compressed person, and all the atoms in that person might play nicely with each other, allowing chemistry to work and that person to survive. But those tiny atoms are sure as hell not going to play nicely with normal-sized atoms. How will your tiny person breathe? What happens when they try to touch something? Will the miniaturized retinal in their eyes even react to bombardment by relatively huge photons? And that’s before we start worrying about the square-cube law or the fact that a .02m-tall you will still weigh (ideally) 93kg. At 1/100 of your height, you are at 1/1003 your volume, meaning a density of about 1×106kg/m3.  That’s a bit denser than a super-massive black hole.

Let’s just say you’d asphyxiate as you burned and froze and evaporated into a puff of Hawking radiation.

So let me put it this way: remember that episode of Futurama where they characters piloted tiny robot versions of themselves through a VR interface? Much more plausible.

And having the main characters be drone pilots doesn’t mean you’d have to give up tension, sure the pilots aren’t in danger of their lives, but maybe they need to navigate the micro-world in order to accomplish something, like defuse a bomb or assassinate a bad guy. Now there’s a story I want to see.