Why 50 cm?
March 28, 2011
Why do we propose to make The Incredible Shrinking Man 50 centimeters? Why not 100 centimeters, or 75?
The first reason is that 50 centimeters, even if very small, is not hard to imagine since it is the average height of newborn babies. However, newborn babies are heavier since they have different proportions. The Incredible Shrinking Man might weigh somewhere between 1,7 and 2 kilograms whereas babies weight 3 kilos or more. Secondly, at 50 centimeters we’ll also consume around 30 to 50 times less food, resources and energy than the average contemporary man. Theoretically The Incredible Shrinking Man only needs 2% off what we need. And last, the shortest adult ever measured was Gul Mohammed with a very close 57 centimeters.
(This post was written before the world learned about the existence of an even shorter adult man, Chandra Bahadur Dangi from Nepal.)
[…] There’s a 40% difference in height between the shortest 5 percentile and the tallest 5 percentile of the adult human population. That puts humans amongst the Earth’s most hypervariable species. Shrinking the body will create an even greater height gap, Younger generations will be shorter than older ones until (after several generations) the entire population reaches our goal of an average height of 50 centimeters. […]