Genetic Research

During the Dark Ages in Europe, Vikings used to sail from Scandinavia to the seacoast of northern Europe and rape, pillage and burn coastal settlements. They were such a blight that prayers offered in churches of potentially afflicted areas always ended in, "And from the fury of the Norsemen, O Lord, preserve us."

I offer up for consideration a 21st century update to that Dark Ages plea, before we ourselves devolve back to the Dark Ages (when, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, people were much smaller than today and lived in a sustainable economy).

There are those who believe in you, O Lord, and ascribe to you the characteristics of omniscience and omnipotence. There are those who do not believe in you, and ascribe to themselves and those like-minded the characteristic of omniscience, and they seek omnipotence in order to force the balance of mankind to accede to their higher wisdom. From such people, O Lord, preserve us.

I dont think such modification would work.

Do you really think that people would stop using those 2.4l V6 engines to go shopping alone? If so, why dont people just do not start using smaller vehicles? Because they care much more about the social status associated with a good sedan than the money or the environmental damage associated with keeping it.

And, do you think people that's used to spend energy in air conditioning 24h a day will stop spending it just because they're shorter? No, and I really think that even with smaller people, the houses would not shrink. "Big is beautifull..."

No. I dont think it's really necessary to reduce people heigh. I think there's one thing to change that can be really cheaper but really harder: culture.

At best this solution would only delay the inevitable. If somehow we were to convince everyone on earth to shrink themselves, then we could survive for a few more generations before the human population exceeds what can be sustained with available resources.

In the long run resources will become extremely scarce no matter what extremes you go to to physically change the needs of the population. At some point even a colony of bacteria wipes itself out unless there is some balance created by predation on the bacteria or starvation due to lack of food.

In some places societal changes have shifted to the point that human populations are stablizing and even decreasing. In the U.S. the average number of children per houshold has voluntarily dropped from 2.4 to 2.1 in the past 20 years, so the deathrate is only slightly slower than the birthrate. In China stiff controls on birthrate were imposed by the government that forced their birthrate to less than 2 children per family (not pleasant to think about, but a fact).

If the trend toward birthrate reduction continues and spreads globally, then people won't have to move to another planet or shrink themselves, but we will still have to give up the V6 petro-powered auto engines for renewable fuels and technologies that allow us to reach balance in the world we live in.

Yes you are right, but just imagine, shrinking dimension by half means 8 times more resources.

After all why most of people want to be 6 footer. because thats the best around us, why we don't like to be 8 or 10 feet tall? in my opinion its all relative, all definition of good are based on available.

Only thing that we need to maintain is a brain of same or bigger size,