Shaq Sequence

Shaquille O’Neal is an American retired professional basketball player. At 2.16 m tall and 147 kg, he was one of the heaviest players ever to play in the NBA. His size inspired the Shaq Sequence, an number of images used by The Incredible Shrinking Man to illustrate the ramifications of human height and how shrinking would translate into a lighter and less needy human species. O’Neill perfectly illustrates that we have a clear choice: continue to grow towards Shaquillian height and much greater resource needs, or shrink and need much less. At 150cm Shaquille O’Neill would lose 30% of his height but 66%, (97kg) of his weight (0,7 height x 0,7 width x 0,7 depth=0,34 weight). While we continue to speculate on an average human height of 50cm this is mainly a theoretical goal as we already know the human species can be as short as 54,6cm. By putting our goal a little beyond this we can be sure not to miss out on any new and exciting developments in regards to the extremely short. At the same time humanity has most to gain from the first 10% to 30% of shrinkage since this is where we give up most of our size. The first cuts are the deepest.