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The 2% food consumption seems like an overly-simplified calculation from the mass reduction. My understanding is that the smaller animals are, the larger their
by cromulent 11y ago
The 2% food consumption seems like an overly-simplified calculation from the mass reduction. My understanding is that the smaller animals are, the larger their surface area to mass ratio, and so their loss of heat increases. Metabolic rate is much higher. Shrews need to eat 90% of their bodyweight everyday or else they die.
- stargazer-3 11y agoAlso, our brains currently consume 20% of the energy produced by our bodies. Even if you manage to "shrink" humans down to 50cm, their brains would still consume 20% of our current energy need for brain only.
- iSnow 11y agoAnd there's the added problem of the well-established correlation between body size and longevity. If we scaled down to cat size, it is reasonable to expect we'd die at 50 instead of 80, even taking our outsize longevity factor into account (https://musingsofajunglequeen.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/slide11.jpg https://musingsofajunglequeen.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/sl...).
- yojo 11y agoThe correlation you note is cross species. I thought within the same species it tends to be reversed (e.g. Smaller dog breeds live longer than big ones). Here's an unscientific article with a footnote that shorter people tend to live longer: http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=49358 http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=49358
- rtl49 11y agoWhat you say is true, but the proposal is to reduce the height of the human species as a whole. Thus the cross-species comparison might be applicable here (i.e. humans at their current height vs. a smaller derived species).