Jake! Jake! Jake, where are you?
Oh hello…Vsauce, I’m Paul. How ya doin? What a surprise! I wasn’t expecting you so soon. You’re probably wondering where
Jake is right? Well this is awkward, I think maybe I shrunk him. Don’t worry, I’m
sure we’ll find him and it’s not like shrinking down to the size of an ant can be
bad thing…right? Ya know, describing things is usually Jake’s department but I do wonder...
What Would Happen if You Were Shrunk?
Oh Vsauce, you found me. Thank goodness because being reduced in size to half an inch tall
is pretty bad for you. If you were to be scaled down to such a degree there are a few directions
it might go. Let’s suppose that only your size would change but your mass, the amount
of matter you’re made of, stays the same. Which would mean that you’d be dense…about
150,000 times more than the densest material we’ve ever found on Earth, Osmium. Being
that dense would be a massive problem. With your ant-sized proportions, you’d be exerting
all that weight over the same area as just 1 pixel on the display you’re currently
looking at. Hello! Only materials like diamond or carbon fiber could sustain such pressures
without cracking due to your presence.
In fact, your density is on scale with a white dwarf, a star that’s used up all its Hydrogen
and collapsed in on itself due to gravity. Imagine the entire mass of the Sun fitting
into something as relatively small as the Earth.
What? What? He's too small. I can't hear what he's saying. Really, I can't even read his lips.
What are you saying? We can't...repeat what you just said...nope...no, I can't tell.
But your voice is so high pitched and cute. I love it. Say it again just for my entertainment
It’s not my fault, Paul! At this size your vocal tract would be very small so the vibrations
would have much smaller wavelengths. Typical male voices have frequencies of 85-180 Hz
but a shrunken man would talk at higher frequencies of 12-26 kHz. Since that’s at the top end
of the spectrum you wouldn’t even hear most of the words, in fact, digital audio for video
can't contain any frequencies above 24khz due to the Nyquist limit. If I stay between
12 and 24 kHz it would sound something like this. The human ear can hear frequencies between
roughly 20Hz and 20kHz. If parts of what I am saying seem to be missing, it’s just
that you can’t hear them.
All very interesting but this is us speculating that your mass would stay constant while being
shrunk. If that were the case, none of this would matter because your body would be crushed
by the inability to support your entire weight.
Soooo let’s go try the other second option.
If our mass scaled proportionally with our body we’d weigh 0.03 grams, that’s about
the weight of 10 snowflakes. As you can imagine even a slight breeze of 8.5mph, about the
same speed of a full size human exhaling, could whisk you away. A sneeze would be even
more damaging at 100mph. However, you might be able to outrun it.
If we were able to scale ants up to human proportions they’d be cruising around at
52mph. In fact almost all micro-sized creatures would be moving really fast. The fastest recorded
animal relative to its size is Paratarsotomus macropalpis, a sesame-seed-sized mite. It
travels at 322 body lengths per second, the equivalent of a human running at 1,300 mph.
And now that you are the size of insect you’d be faster as well thanks to the Froude Number.
The Froude Number is equal to the centripetal force involved to make your legs swing, divided
by the gravitational force on your legs. So by shrinking yourself down and keeping your
Froude number fixed, you’d actually take 12 times more steps than if you were full
sized. Add to the fact your strides would be 66% bigger, you’d be 20 times faster
than normal.
I should probably figure out a way to bring Jake to regular size but this is just so fun.
You're so fast, Jake. Running around like a bug.
Run, Jake! Run!
One thing that could slow you down is water. At our ant scale fluids act 21,000 times thicker
than we’re used to – it’d be like trying to swim through chocolate syrup…but less
delicious. The good news is that you’d be able to walk on water. It’s surface tension
would be able to support you without breaking. Ants do this all the time and also form tightly
knit rafts to carry themselves across rivers. As long as the surface tension doesn’t break,
you won’t suffer a slow horrible watery death.
Let’s go back to your increased speed and energy because it comes at a cost. Your metabolism
would be ridiculous. To keep up with how quickly you move and the fact that the surface area
of your body is relatively much larger than your actual body you’d be losing a lot of
heart, so you’d have to eat...a lot...like every hour of every day. Your likelihood of
survival isn’t great. But wait...I think I have an idea about how I can get back to
normal size, HEY PAUL!
*sneezes* Jake? Jake?!
Oh...Oh, Jake I am so sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry. Let me just get you off the lens. Oh..oh no.
Jake...I'm just gonna go, OK? Um, but as always, thanks for watching.
for watching.